One of my obsessions is scalability and one of the main ways of achieving scalability in apps is to make the most appropriate use of the resources you have. With this in mind one of the rapidly growing ways of achieving this optimal resource use is spreading work across multiple processors. Up until now multithreading has been a bit of a pain to use correctly; note I said correctly, .NET makes it easy to do but a lot of people use it inappropriately and end up doing more harm than good. Reading through the October 2007 edition of MSDN magazine there's lots of stuff on some 'new' ways of multithreading in .NET (and C++), guidance around avoiding some of the more common problems such as deadlocks. I especially like the new PLINQ article (Parallel LINQ, get it?) in there, looks like a really nice way to achieve optimal resource use with relatively little penalties either in productivity or perf!
Anyway, great magazine this month and worth setting aside a couple of hours for...