All about Async/Await, System.Threading.Tasks, System.Collections.Concurrent, System.Linq, and more…
April 4, 2013Apr 4, 201304/4/13The .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,
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,
December 14, 2012Dec 14, 201212/14/12Igor 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,
November 16, 2012Nov 16, 201211/16/12In 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),
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 22, 2012Sep 22, 201209/22/12Astute 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.
