It seems everybody loves the thread pool. The default scheduler in Windows Workflow uses the thread pool, as does ASP.NET and the BeginInvoke method of every delegate. There is only one pool per process, which seems a bit limiting with such a big party inside.
Joe Duffy says there is a lot of work going into improving the ThreadPool in future versions of the base class library, I wonder if future versions will allow for some partitioning of work. .
A couple people have asked me about custom thread pools. I do see the need in some scenarios, but writing a custom thread pool is hard. I generally point people to custom thread pools that smart people have already built:
Jon Skeet has a custom thread pool class on this page. The pool is configurable and allows you to separate your threads from the threads in the system pool.
Mike Woodring has a custom thread pool available on this page. The thread pool is configurable, instrumented, and has a great many features.
