Astute users of the Task Parallel Library might have noticed three new options available across TaskCreationOptions and TaskContinuationOptions in .NET 4.5: DenyChildAttach, HideScheduler, and (on TaskContinuationOptions) LazyCancellation. I wanted to take a few minutes to share more about what these are and why we added them....
Given that .NET 4.5 has only recently been released in its final form, it’s not surprising that many folks are still very new to the async/await keywords and have misconceptions about what they are and what they do (I’ve tried to clarify some of these in this Async/Await FAQ). One of the more common misconceptions is that a method...
As just announced on the Base Class Libraries (BCL) team blog, the RTM release of TPL Dataflow is now available.Enjoy...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
