one of the biggest and most important things developers should now be doing is making sure their applications are Multi Core and Multi Processor aware. and not only Aware, but also know how to use all processors in the system. I dont know how many times i have loaded up a process to do some long running task to find its only using 25% of the total power of my Dual proc, Dual Core machine, ie, only one processing core.

Well, there is a new way to speed up your applications, and its quite easy too! Soma has announced the availability of a new framework addition called the Parallel Extentions. these run on the .NET Framework 3.5 and allow easy mutli processor enablment of your application. they are currently in CTP form, but its something i have to use for testing. There is also a MSDN Magazine article talking about Parallel LINQ, which is also part of this release.

The download is available here, and as i said, you need the .NET Framework 3.5, so VS2008 required. Downloading everything required as we speek!