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...
From time to time, I receive questions from developers which highlight either a need for more information about the new “async” and “await” keywords in C# and Visual Basic. I’ve been cataloguing these questions, and I thought I’d take this opportunity to share my answers to them.Conceptual Overviewhttps://msdn.co...
Developers familiar with parallel programming are also familiar with a wide range of potential problems that can occur when practicing the art. One of the most well-known issues is “deadlock,” where two or more operations are waiting on each other to complete in a manner such that none of them will be able to complete.I’ve r...
In .NET 4.5 Beta, the Stream class provides multiple virtual methods related to reading and writing: As a developer deriving from Stream, it’s helpful to understand what the base implementations do and when you can and should override them.Read, Write, FlushThe Read, Write, and Flush methods are the core synchronous mechanisms...
Developers often ask for guidance on how to write responsive user interfaces. Reading most books about the .NET Framework over the past ten years, you’ll see coverage of the asynchronous programming model which requires a lot of careful attention while coding. That’s why the async features in the latest versions of C# and Visual Basic are tremendou...
Lately I’ve received several questions along the lines of the following, which I typically summarize as “async over sync”: In my library, I have a method “public T Foo();”. I’m considering exposing an asynchronous method that would simply wrap the synchronous one, e.g. “public Task<T> FooAsync...
Are you using the new System.Threading.Tasks.Dataflow.dll library, either from its CTPs or from the .NET 4.5 Developer Preview or Beta? We'd love to hear about it, and if you have time, what your experiences have been (good or bad). What kind of solution are you building, and how are you using TPL Dataflow in it? Has the library h...
After my previous post, I received several emails and comments from folks asking why I chose to implement ForEachAsync the way I did. My goal with that post wasn’t to prescribe a particular approach to iteration, but rather to answer a question I’d received… obviously, however, I didn’t provide enough background. Let ...
Jon Skeet recently asked me how I might go about implementing the following “asynchronous ForEach” behavior: Given what we now know about SemaphoreSlim from my previous post, here’s one way to achieve this: public static Task ForEachAsync<TSource, TResult>( this IEnumerable<TSource> ...
Thanks to everyone who attended my "The Zen of Async" presentation on Thursday at the MVP Summit. As I've had several requests, here are the slides and code for the talk. Toub_MVPSummit2012_ZenOfAsync.zip
