Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD) Certification Practice Test

What technique enables parallel execution of queries in PLINQ?

1. Using AsParallel()

2. Utilizing Parallel.Invoke()

3. Calling Task.Run()

4. Employing ForEach()

The correct answer is: Using AsParallel()

The technique that enables parallel execution of queries in PLINQ (Parallel LINQ) is utilizing AsParallel(). This method is specifically designed to convert a standard LINQ query into a parallel one, allowing for the leveraging of multiple processors and cores. When you call AsParallel() on a LINQ query, PLINQ takes care of distributing the workload across available system resources, which can significantly improve performance when dealing with large datasets or computationally intensive tasks. The main benefit of this parallel execution is that it can reduce the overall processing time by executing parts of the query concurrently, thus improving efficiency. In contrast, while Parallel.Invoke() and Task.Run() are useful for executing tasks in parallel, they are not specific to LINQ queries and do not inherently provide the query optimization that AsParallel() does. Employing ForEach() in this context refers to iterating over a collection, but without the AsParallel() call, it does not enable query parallelism. Hence, AsParallel() is the most appropriate technique for achieving parallel execution in PLINQ.