Java's ThreadPoolExecutor equivalent for C#?

Question

I used to make good use of Java's ThreadPoolExecutor class and have yet to find a good equivalent in C#. I know of ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem which is useful in many cases but no good if you want to control the number of threads assigned to a task or have multiple individual queues for different task types.

For example I liked to use a ThreadPoolExecutor with a single thread to guarantee sequential execution of asynchronous calls.. Is there an easy way to do this in C#? Is there a non-static thread pool implementation?

Answer 1

Until .Net 4.0 and the TPL, there is no such feature built-in.

However, see this artcle

Answer 2

As part of the Reactive Extensions (Rx), the Task Parallel Library was backported to .NET 3.5. If you add a reference to the System.Threading.dll including in its distribution, you can use the TPL with .NET 3.5.

There are also thread pools built into the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime, which is freely available for use. See this MSDN article for use.