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Acknowledgments
An oft-repeated fable is that the workmen who paint the Forth Railway Bridge, a large
Victorian cantilever structure that spans the Firth of Forth just north of Edinburgh, have a
job for life. According to the myth, it takes them several years to paint it from one end to
the other, and when they have finished they have to start over again. I am not sure whether
this is due to the ferocity of the Scottish weather, or the sensitivity of the paint that is used,
although my daughter insists it is simply that the members of Edinburgh City Council have
yet to decide on a color scheme that they really like for the bridge. I sometimes feel that this
book has similar attributes. No sooner have I completed an edition and seen it published,
then Microsoft announces another cool update for Visual Studio and C#, and my friends at
Microsoft Press contact me and say, “What are your plans for the next edition?” However,
unlike painting the Forth Railway Bridge, working on a new edition of this text is always an
enjoyable task with a lot more scope for inventiveness than trying to work out new ways
to hold a paint brush. There is always something novel to learn and innovative technology
to play with. In this edition, I cover the new features of C# 4.0 and the .NET Framework 4.0,
which developers will find invaluable for building applications that can take advantage of the
increasingly powerful hardware now becoming available. Hence, although this work appears
to be a never-ending task, it is always fruitful and pleasurable.
A large part of the enjoyment when working on a project such as this is the opportunity to
collaborate with a highly motivated group of talented people within Microsoft Press, the
developers at Microsoft working on Visual Studio 2010, and the people who review each
chapter and make suggestions for various improvements. I would especially like to single out
Rosemary Caperton and Stephen Sagman who have worked tirelessly to keep the project
on track, to Per Blomqvist who reviewed (and corrected) each chapter, and to Roger LeBlanc
who had the thankless task of copy-editing the manuscript and converting my prose into
English. I must also make special mention of Michael Blome who provided me with early
access to software and answered the many questions that I had concerning the Task Parallal
Library. Several members of Content Master were kept gainfully employed reviewing and
testing the code for the exercises—thanks Mike Sumsion, Chris Cully, James Millar, and Louisa
Perry. Of course, I must additionally thank Jon Jagger who co-authored the first edition of
this book with me back in 2001.
Last but by no means least, I must thank my family. My wife Diana is a wonderful source
of inspiration. When writing Chapter 28 on the Task Parallel Library I had a mental block
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