Parallel Programming with Microsoft® .NET
by Colin Campbell, Ralph Johnson, Ade Miller, Stephen Toub

Everyone seems to have a favorite story about a parallel program that did not behave as expected because of a mysterious bug. These stories should inspire a healthy respect for the difficulty of the problems you face in writing your own parallel programs. Fortunately, help has arrived. Microsoft Visual Studio® 2010 introduces a new programming model for parallelism that significantly simplifies the job. Behind the scenes are supporting libraries with sophisticated algorithms that dynamically distribute computations on multicore architectures. Proven design patterns are another source of help. Parallel Programming with Microsoft® .NET introduces you to the most important and frequently used patterns of parallel programming and gives executable code samples for them, using the Task Parallel Library (TPL) and Parallel LINQ (PLINQ).

Moving Applications to the Cloud on the Microsoft Windows® Azure™ Program
by Eugenio Pace, Dominic Betts, Scott Densmore, Ryan Dunn, Masashi Narumoto, Matias Woloski

This book is the first volume in a planned series about the Windows® Azure™ platform and focuses on a migration scenario. It introduces a fictitious company named Adatum which step-by-step modifies its expense tracking and reimbursement system, aExpense, so that it can be deployed to Windows Azure. Each chapter explores different considerations: authentication and authorization, data access, session management, deployment, development life cycle and cost analysis.