Task list comments are a great way to remind you or others of something that still needs to be done or something that may need to be revisited for enhancement.

The task list (Ctrl-Alt-K/View.TaskList) is a handy tool that is most often used to view errors or warnings from the compilation of your code.

The task list also has another use; it can be used to leave reminders for yourself or other members of your team in comment form.

You can use this comment anywhere throughout your code, and they will show up in the task list when the file with the comment is open.

//

// TODO: Add addition logic here

//

To list this in your task list first make sure that the task list is configured to show comments, and then you will see in the task list that this comment has been added as an item.

You will see a drop-down list at the top of the task list that lets you choose what should be displayed in the task list.

You can then click on this comment and be taken to the place where you need to add code.

You can use shortcuts to step back and forth between tasks as well. The View.NextTask ( Ctrl-Shift-F12) and View.PreviousTask (no default shortcut) commands can be used to step through the tasks listed in the task list.

You can also click in the area at the top of the task list with the text “Click here to add a new task,” or  you can click the Create User Task button. This creates a user task for you and acts much like the tasks portion of Outlook. You can also tag any line in your project as a task by using the Edit.ToggleTaskListShortcut (Ctrl-K, Ctrl-H) command. Whenever you call this command, it will add a shortcut to the task list pointing to this line of code. You can then add text that says what should be done to the line of code. It is a quick and easy way to add something to the task list to tackle later on. These tasks will appear only on your system and not on the systems of your team members.

Parallel Development

As demands for application performance increased, customers
have traditionally solved the problem by simply increasing the
underlying power of the hardware that the application is running
on. Over the last several years developers have seen the CPUs
that their applications run on start to include 2, 4 or more cores.
While the power of the hardware has increased, the transition
to a multi-core environment has impacted the applications that
developers write. The majority of applications will not be able to
automatically take advantage of this multi-core hardware change.
Developers will need to modify the way they write applications
and the architectures they use for these applications.

Creating parallel capable code using current technologies is
unfortunately not trivial. Multi-thread programming introduces
not only application architecture challenges to complexity and
robustness but also exposes the tooling developers use as being
optimized for single-threaded development.

Microsoft is making a major commitment to make parallel
development accessible to a wide range of developers, whether
they are using native code or the .NET Framework. With Visual
Studio 2010 we are delivering:

• Visual Studio IDE support for Parallel development
• Native C++ libraries and compiler support
for Parallel applications

The .NET Framework 4.0 also provides the core framework
support to build parallel applications through technologies such
as P-LIINQ and parallel language semantics and framework
components. Visual Studio 2010 provides integrated parallel
development support. In Visual Studio 2010 the debugger is
aware of the parallel nature of code and can present the state of
the application execution during debugging across the different
parallel execution units. The debugger also has custom displays
for parallel code such as task & thread windows and a “multi” or
“cactus” stack view window that graphically shows the execution
path of the individual tasks.

Being able to develop and debug your application doesn’t
mean that it takes advantage of all the available power. To
help developers do this, Visual Studio 2010 also includes
a parallel capable performance analyzer that enables you
to extensively instrument you code to visually see the
concurrency issues that are in your applications. Combine
this with the features of the Visual Studio IDE, and developers
have a highly productive, visual environment for building the
best parallel capable applications available.