Yesterday, Somasegar announced the release of the first ParallelFX CTP on his blog.

As Soma puts it, ParallelFX contains:

• Imperative data and task parallelism APIs, including parallel for and foreach loops, to make the transition from sequential to parallel programs simpler.
• Declarative data parallelism in the form of a data parallel implementation of LINQ-to-Objects.  This allows you to run LINQ queries on multiple processors.
• First class tasks that can be used to schedule, wait on, and cancel parallel work.
• New concurrency runtime used across the library to enable lightweight tasks and effectively map and balance the concurrency expressed in code to available concurrent resources on the execution platform.

I believe this will significantly simplify multithreaded development for .NET, to the extent we might actually get to see programs that use those dual or quad core CPU's you all want for Xmas.

Download it from MSDN.