Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Concurrent Collections

Parallel computing basically relies on multithreading, although with some particular specifications for taking advantage of multicore architectures. The real problem is when you need to work with collections, because in a multithreaded environment, multiple threads could access a collection attempting to make edits that need to be controlled. The .NET Framework 4.0 introduces a number of thread-safe concurrent collections, exposed by the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace, which is useful in parallel computing with the .NET Framework because they grant concurrent access to their members from threads.

What does Thread-Safe Mean?

A collection is thread-safe when access to its members is allowed to only one thread ...