Microsoft's Concurrency and Coordination Runtime quite literally saved a project that was running into major issues with deadlocking. Since then I find that I use it more and more frequently for almost anything that requires asynchronous coding producing results that run lighter and faster than before. I can honestly state that it has transformed the way I think about multithread/multicore dev. Despite my personal love for CCR, there appears to be very little buzz surrounding it on the web and was wondering if anyone can offer any reason for this. Are there better alternatives, or is it a lack of promotion from MS, or are people simply happy with the existing tools?
The licensing around it is a bit of a pain, from what I remember.
I think most people are waiting for Parallel Extensions in .NET 4.0. I know it's not quite the same thing, but it's still a lot better than what's in the framework at the moment - and although the continuations don't work the same way, at least they're there :)
I suspect that Parallel Extensions has had rather more work on it than CCR - although I'm sure the CCR work inspired some of the design of PFX as well.