In a post a while ago, I talked about sequential composition of asynchronous operations.  Now that we have the async/await keywords in C# and Visual Basic, such composition is trivial, and async/await are indeed the recommended way to achieve such composition with these languages.However, in that post I also described a few “Then” ...

Recently I’ve had several folks ask me about how to process the results of tasks as those tasks complete.A developer will have multiple tasks representing asynchronous operations they’ve initiated, and they want to process the results of these tasks, e.g. List<Task<T>> tasks = …; foreach(var t in tasks) { ...

I’ve been asked a few times recently various questions about ExecutionContext and SynchronizationContext, for example what the differences are between them, what it means to “flow” them, and how they relate to the new async/await keywords in C# and Visual Basic.  I thought I’d try to tackle some of those questions here....

Several weeks ago, I wrote a post for the Windows 8 app developer blog that was all about using await and AsTask to consume WinRT async operations.  I've now published a follow-up post that's all about exposing .NET tasks as WinRT async operation.  In a sense, you can think about the first post as showing how to convert from WinRT as...

In the previous "What's New for Parallelism in Visual Studio 2012 RC" blog post, I mentioned briefly that for the .NET 4.5 Release Candidate, StreamReader.ReadLineAsync experienced a significant performance improvement over Beta.  There's an intriguing story behind that, one I thought I'd share here.It has to do with some interesting inte...

In September, I blogged about what was new for parallelism and asynchrony in the Visual Studio 2012 Developer Preview, and in February I followed that up with a post on what was new in the Beta.  Now that Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate is out, I want to share a few thoughts on what’s new in the Release Candidate.Most new features f...

Since .NET 4’s release, I’ve received several questions about a peculiar behavior of ConcurrentQueue<T> having to do with memory management.With Queue<T>, List<T>, and other such data structures in the .NET Framework, when you remove an element from the collection, the collection internally wipes out its reference to t...

We’re happy to announce that you can now download an Async Targeting Pack for Visual Studio 11 that lets you target .NET 4 and Silverlight 5.  The included DLLs address the previously discussed issue of the Visual Studio 11 Beta compilers being incompatible with the AsyncCtpLibrary* DLLs from the Async CTP; with this targeting pack, you ...

Over on the Windows 8 app developer blog, I've written a blog post about using await with WinRT.  I hope you enjoy it!

In a previous post Should I expose asynchronous wrappers for synchronous methods?, I discussed “async over sync,” the notion of using synchronous functionality asynchronously and the benefits that doing so may or may not yield. The other direction of “sync over async” is also interesting to explore. Avoid Exposing Synchrono...