5.8. Future Considerations

By parallelizing an application, you can greatly speed it up (or slow it down if you do it badly!). It is worth considering the following:

• It is a shame that the ability to utilize all available processing power on a machine (e.g., dormant GPUs) was not included in this release.

• Many developers feel the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR) should have been included in this release. The CCR assists with creating loosely coupled asynchronous applications, and was originally included with Microsoft Robotics Studio (it has since been separated out). At the time of writing, the CCR is not free for commercial usage. For more info on CCR, please refer to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/bb648752.aspx.

• Looking toward the future, is it possible that a future version of Task Manager could allow you to distribute work across multiple machines, paving the way for grid computing libraries within .NET?

• Multicore shift will mean that existing pricing/licensing models need to be reconsidered.