You made it! I admit that the previous two chapters were not much fun and that they mostly tried to scare you away from multithreaded code. Now it's time for something completely different.

In this chapter, I'll cover the fun parts of multithreaded programming by moving to high-level concepts—tasks and patterns. We will not create any threads in the code, no we won't. Instead, we'll just tell the code what we need, and it will handle all the nitty-gritty details.

When you have read this chapter to its conclusion, you'll know all about the following topics:

• What are tasks, and how are they different from threads?
• How do we create and destroy tasks?
• What are our options for managing tasks?
• How should we handle exceptions in tasks?
• What is thread pooling, and why is it useful?
• What are patterns, and why are they better than tasks?
• How can we use the Async/Await pattern to execute operations in a thread?
• How can we use Join pattern to execute multiple parts of code in parallel?
• What is a Future, and how can it help when calculating functions?
• How can we convert a normal loop into a parallel loop with Parallel For?
• How can a pipeline help us parallelize many different problems?