In April, we released the Async CTP Refresh, and since then we've seen fantastic adoption of the technology. We've also seen the technology landscape evolve. Windows Phone 7.5, aka "Mango", was released. Silverlight 5 has had both a Beta and an RC release. And there have been multiple patches to Visual Studio and the .NET Fr...
When you start using async methods heavily, you’ll likely see a particular pattern of composition pop up from time to time. Its structure is typically either of the form: async Task FooAsync() { … // some initialization code without awaits await BarAsync(…); ...
In .NET 4, Task.Factory.StartNew was the primary method for scheduling a new task. Many overloads provided for a highly configurable mechanism, enabling setting options, passing in arbitrary state, enabling cancellation, and even controlling scheduling behaviors. The flip side of all of this power is complexity. You need to know w...
The October 2011 issue of MSDN Magazine is now available online. In it, you can find three articles about the new async/await features of C# and Visual Basic. While the articles can stand alone, they were written with each other in mind in order to provide a 1-2-3 on-ramp into the world of asynchronous programming with these new languag...
Consider a type that will print out a message when it’s finalized, and that has a Dispose method which will suppress finalization: class DisplayOnFinalize : IDisposable { public void Dispose() { GC.SuppressFinalize(this); } ~DisplayOnFinalize() { Console.WriteLine(“Finalized”); } } Now conside...
“Don’t forget to complete your tasks.” That guidance may sound trivial and silly, but I recently saw it as a source of a bug in software written by some very smart folks, and thus thought this would be a good opportunity to remind folks of the imperative.Tasks represent a promise. If you hand one out, someone else may&...
For the .NET Framework 4.5 Developer Preview, a lot of work has been done to improve the Task Parallel Library (TPL), in terms of functionality, in terms of performance, and in terms of integration with the rest of the .NET Framework. With all of this work, we’ve strived for a very high compatibility bar, which means your applications t...
It’s been a few months since April when we last released a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of System.Threading.Tasks.Dataflow.dll, aka “TPL Dataflow”. Today for your programming pleasure, we have another update.As mentioned in “What’s New for Parallelism in .NET 4.5”, System.Threading.Tasks.Dataflow.dll ...
[Updated 5/17/2012 for Visual Studio 11 Beta] In Visual Studio 11 Beta, C++ AMP enables you to accelerate your applications using heterogeneous hardware such as GPUs. If you are a .NET developer, you can still use C++ AMP in your applications. You’ll write most of your code in C#, the pieces to execute on the GPU in C++ AMP, and then use yo...
Thanks to everyone who attended my two talks at BUILD this past week, and I hope you enjoyed the sessions! For those of you unable to attend in person, the recordings of the talks are now available on Channel9: There were hundreds of other sessions this week at BUILD, and you can find their videos here: https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUI...
