C# - ThreadPool vs Tasks

Question

As some may have seen in .NET 4.0, they've added a new namespace System.Threading.Tasks which basically is what is means, a task. I've only been using it for a few days, from using ThreadPool.

Which one is more efficient and less resource consuming? (Or just better overall?)

Answer 1

The objective of the Tasks namespace is to provide a pluggable architecture to make multi-tasking applications easier to write and more flexible.

The implementation uses a TaskScheduler object to control the handling of tasks. This has virtual methods that you can override to create your own task handling. Methods include for instance

protected virtual void QueueTask(Task task) public virtual int MaximumConcurrencyLevel 

There will be a tiny overhead to using the default implementation as there's a wrapper around the .NET threads implementation, but I'd not expect it to be huge.

There is a (draft) implementation of a custom TaskScheduler that implements multiple tasks on a single thread here.

Answer 2

which one is more efficient and less resource consuming?

Irrelevant, there will be very little difference.

(Or just better overall)

The Task class will be the easier-to-use as it offers a very clean interface for starting and joining threads, and transfers exceptions. It also supports a (limited) form of load balancing.