Acknowledgments

Writing a technical book is a communal effort. The patterns & practices group always involves both experts and the broader community in its projects. Although this makes the writing process lengthier and more complex, the end result is always more relevant. The authors drove this book's direction and developed its content, but they want to acknowledge the other people who contributed in various ways.

This book depends heavily on the work we did in Parallel Programming with Microsoft .NET. While much of the text in the current book has changed, it discusses the same fundamental patterns. Because of this shared history, we’d like to again thank the co-authors of the first book: Ralph Johnson (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign) Stephen Toub (Microsoft), and the following reviewers who provided feedback on the entire text: Nicholas Chen, DannyDig, Munawar Hafiz, Fredrik Berg Kjolstad and Samira Tasharofi, (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign), Reed Copsey, Jr. (C Tech Development Corporation), and Daan Leijen (Microsoft Research). Judith Bishop (Microsoft Research) reviewed the text and also gave us her valuable perspective as an author. Their contributions shaped the .NET book and their influence is still apparent in Parallel Programming with Microsoft Visual C++.

Once we understood how to implement the patterns in C++, our biggest challenge was to ensure technical accuracy. We relied on members of the Parallel Computing Platform (PCP) team at Microsoft to provide information about the Parallel Patterns Library and the Asynchronous Agents Library, and to review both the text and the accompanying samples. Dana Groff, Niklas Gustafsson and Rick Molloy (Microsoft) devoted many hours to the initial interviews we conducted, as well as to the reviews. Several other members of the PCP team also gave us a great deal of their time. They are: Genevieve Fernandes, Bill Messmer, Artur Laksberg, and Ayman Shoukry (Microsoft).

In addition to the content about the two libraries, the book and samples also contain material on related topics. We were fortunate to have access to members of the Visual Studio teams responsible for these areas. Drake Campbell, Sasha Dadiomov, and Daniel Moth (Microsoft) provided feedback on the debugger and profiler described in Appendix B. Pat Brenner and Stephan T. Lavavej (Microsoft) reviewed the code samples and our use of the Microsoft Foundation Classes and the Standard Template Library.

We would also like to thank, once again, Reed Copsey, Jr. (C Tech Development Corporation), Samira Tasharofi (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign), and Paul Petersen (Intel) for their reviews of individual chapters. As with the first book, our schedule was aggressive, but the reviewers worked extra hard to help us meet it. Thank you, everyone.

There were a great many people who spoke to us about the book and provided feedback. They include the attendees at the Intel and Microsoft Parallelism Techdays (Bellevue), as well as contributors to discussions on the book's CodePlex site.

A team of technical writers and editors worked to make the prose readable and interesting. They include Roberta Leibovitz (Modeled Computation LLC), Nancy Michell (Content Masters LTD), and RoAnn Corbisier (Microsoft).

Rick Carr (DCB Software Testing, Inc) tested the samples and content.

The innovative visual design concept used for this guide was developed by Roberta Leibovitz and Colin Campbell (Modeled Computation LLC) who worked with a group of talented designers and illustrators. The book design was created by John Hubbard (eson). The cartoons that face the chapters were drawn by the award-winning Seattle-based cartoonist Ellen Forney. The technical illustrations were done by Katie Niemer (Modeled Computation LLC).

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