All about Async/Await, System.Threading.Tasks, System.Collections.Concurrent, System.Linq, and more…
April 3, 2013Apr 3, 201304/3/13A 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>
March 13, 2013Mar 13, 201303/13/13I 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.
February 20, 2013Feb 20, 201302/20/13Lucian 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.
January 28, 2013Jan 28, 201301/28/13These 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,
January 13, 2013Jan 13, 201301/13/13Recently 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,
October 5, 2012Oct 5, 201210/5/12This 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,
September 11, 2012Sep 11, 201209/11/12Given 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).
August 21, 2012Aug 21, 201208/21/12As just announced on the Base Class Libraries (BCL) team blog, the RTM release of TPL Dataflow is now available.
Enjoy 🙂
August 15, 2012Aug 15, 201208/15/12In 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.
August 2, 2012Aug 2, 201208/2/12Recently 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.
