Defining Threads

Summary

This chapter outlined a wide range of important threading topics. The chapters began with the basics of multitasking and how it is accomplished by using threads and then moved on to discuss the differences between multitasking and free threading. Next, it considered processes and how they isolate data from other applications, before looking at the function of threads in an operating system such as Windows. You now know that Windows interrupts threads to grant execution time to other threads for a brief period called a time slice or a quantum and what implications this has for program execution as a whole. You’ve learned the function of thread priorities and the different levels of these priorities, and also that threads will inherit their parent process’s priority by default.

This chapter also described how the .NET runtime monitors threads created in the .NET environment and additionally any unmanaged threads that execute managed code. You learned about the support for threading in the .NET Framework and how the System. AppDomain class provides an additional layer of logical data isolation on top of the physical process data isolation. The chapter has looked at how threads can cross easily from one AppDomain to another. Finally, you learned how an AppDomain doesn’t necessarily have its own thread as all processes do.