Have you heard of Microsoft F# yet?

F# is a functional programming language that runs on Microsoft's Common Language Runtime and the .NET Framework. This means that F# has access to .NET Framework APIs and, conversely, that other .NET languages can use F# libraries. This Fast Guide offers a quick introduction to F# programming best practices and attempts to answer key questions about this new .NET implementation. Click here for more information

Microsoft offers Parallel Programming with .NET 3.5

Late last year, just after Visual Studio 2008 was formally released, Microsoft offered preview software that shows where things may be headed in terms of support for parallelism in future versions of .NET and Visual Studio. Microsoft announced the Parallel Extensions Community Technology Preview (CTP) that runs on the .NET Framework 3.5, thus tapping into features in C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 2008. Parallelism APIs in the new .NET extensions support parallel For and ForEach loops. Declarative data parallelism is supported in the form of a data parallel implementation of LINQ-to-Objects that eases implementation of LINQ queries that run on multiple processors. Meanwhile a new concurrency runtime maps and balances code to available concurrent resources on the execution platform. Pretty cool huh!