Stephen Toub

There are several nice API-level enhancements to the Task Parallel Library in .NET 4.6, which you can grab a preview of as part of the Visual Studio 2015 CTP.
Task.From*
.NET 4.5 had a Task.FromResult method.  This method makes it quick and easy to manufacture a new Task for a known result value,

The .NET Framework blog published this morning a guest post from yours truly on .NET Memory Allocation Profiling with Visual Studio 2012.  As you’re trying to improve the performance, throughput, and memory usage of code that uses Tasks, the described profiler in Visual Studio can be a valuable tool in your tool belt (of course,

A few years back, Wes Dyer wrote a great post on monads, and more recently, Eric Lippert wrote a terrific blog series exploring monads and C#. In that series, Eric alluded to Task<TResult> several times, so I thought I’d share a few related thoughts on Task<TResult>

I can be a bit sensitive when it comes to language and how concepts are conveyed.  I think it’s important to be accurate, even if not precise, when describing what something is or how to use it, as otherwise the folks to whom you’re communicating can easily form the wrong mental model for that thing. 

Lucian Wischik and I presented an “async clinic” at the MVP Summit in Bellevue this week.  The async/await keywords in C# and Visual Basic drastically simplify asynchronous programming, but that of course doesn’t mean that using them is without any gotchas: the goal of the discussion was to highlight some of the key areas in which we see developers struggling with asynchronous development and to help provide guidance on avoiding and overcoming those roadblocks. 

These days it’s not uncommon for me to receive an email or read a forum post from someone concerned about a problem they’re experiencing with an async method they’ve written, and they’re seeking help debugging the issue.  Sometimes plenty of information about the bug is conveyed,

Recently I was writing an app that processed a bunch of files asynchronously.  As with the Windows copy file dialog, I wanted to be able to provide the user with a button that would pause the processing operation.
To achieve that,

Igor Ostrovsky is one of the minds behind the parallel programming support in the .NET Framework.  Igor’s recently written a great set of articles for MSDN Magazine to cover “The C# Memory Model in Theory and Practice“.  Part 1 is available now in the December 2012 issue,

In both .NET 4 and .NET 4.5, PLINQ supports enumerables with up to Int32.MaxValue elements.  Beyond that limit, PLINQ will throw an overflow exception.  LINQ to Objects itself has this limitation with certain query operators (such as the indexed Select operator which counts the elements processed),

This is a question I hear relatively frequently:

“I have an async operation that’s not cancelable.  How do I cancel it?”

The construction of the question often makes me chuckle, but I understand and appreciate what’s really being asked.  The developer typically isn’t asking how to cancel the operation itself (if they are asking that,