Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

What Is a Task?

Chapter 44, “Processes and Multithreading,” discusses multithreading and illustrates how a thread is a unit of work that you can use to split a big task across multiple units of work. Different from the pure threading world, in parallel computing the most important concept is the task, which is simply the basic unit of work, which can be scaled across all available processors. A task is not a thread; a thread can run multiple tasks, but each task can be also scaled across more than one thread, depending on available resources. The task is therefore the most basic unit of work for operations executed in parallel. In terms of code, a task is nothing but an instance of the System.Threading.Tasks.Task class that holds a reference ...