To increase the overall computation power, processors are coming with multiple cores on a single die. To successfully harness the power of multicore or many core systems, conventional sequential applications need to be redesigned. You need to break sequential application into modules to be processed on different cores which is very difficult.

To enable developers to build applications that can harness multicore capability, VS 2010 comes with following features: Parallel pattern Library, native C++ libraries that use lambda function and align well with Standard Template Library (STL), Parallel Extension to .NET Framework, library based support for imperative data and task parallelism via the Task Parallel Library, support for declarative data parallelism via PLINQ, and work coordination and managing shared state via Coordination Data Structures, Concurrency Runtime, resource management of multicore hardware and task scheduling, parallel debugging windows which will provide a view of tasks running in the application, and a graphical view of parallel call stacks, Parallel profiling views which will give developers an understanding of their application's core utilization, thread behavior and contention blocking, and thread execution pattern per core.