Microsoft just released Beta 1 versions of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0, which contain its new support for parallel programming. The v1 of Parallel Extensions for .Net is part of .Net 4.0.
Parallel Extensions includes task and data parallelism, and tools for building concurrent and parallel applications. This is a sine qua non feature considering the increasing occurrence of multiple core processors, because the chips aren’t getting faster, they’re just adding more cores.