The Patterns and Practices group at Microsoft has released guidance for parallel programming with .NET 4 called Design Patterns for Decomposition and Coordination on Multicore Architectures. The book is available in print and ebook forms from O’Reilly, but the above link is to the free version available via MSDN. Looks like it should be a good, quick read that I’ll need to get to soon.

I have used the Task Parallel Library a bit in .NET 4 now and I am impressed at how it has simplified the syntax for parallel programming. Unfortunately, there is no way to really simplify the concept and thought process necessary for multi-threading an application that requires synchronization.