Month: October 2010

I apologise in advance if this post ends up slightly rambly. Unlike the previous entries, this only partly deals with existing features. Instead, it considers how we might like to handle some situations, and where the language and type system thwarts us a little. Most of the code will be incomplete, as producing something realistic and complete is tricky. Almost everything I’ve written about so far has dealt with the situation where we just want to execute one asynchronous operation at a time. That’s the case which the await keyword makes particularly easy to work with. That’s certainly a useful … Continue reading Dreaming of multiple tasks

Some of you may remember the bizarre query expressions I’ve come up with before now. These rely on LINQ finding the members it needs (Select, Where, SelectMany etc) statically but without relying on any particular interface. I was pleased to see that the C# 5 async support is based on the same idea. Here’s the relevant bit of the draft spec: The expression t of an await-expression await t is called the task of the await expression. The task t is required to be awaitable, which means that all of the following must hold: (t).GetAwaiter() is a valid expression of … Continue reading C# 5 async: experimenting with member resolution (GetAwaiter, BeginAwait, EndAwait)

Yes, this has been a busy few days for blog posts. One of the comments on my previous blog post suggested there may be some confusion over how the control flow works with async. It’s always very possible that I’m the one who’s confused, so I thought I’d investigate. This time I’m not even pretending to come up with a realistic example. As with my previous code, I’m avoiding creating a .NET Task myself, and sticking with my own custom "awaiter" classes. Again, the aim is to give more insight into what the C# compiler is doing for us. I … Continue reading C# 5 async: investigating control flow

Eric Lippert’s latest (at the time of this writing) blog post asks for suggestions for alternatives to the new "await" keyword, which has inappropriate connotations that confuse people. In particular, it sounds like the thread is going to sit there waiting for the result, when the whole point is that it doesn’t. There have been many suggestions in the comments, and lots of them involve "yield". I was initially in favour of this too, but on further reflection I don’t think it’s appropriate, for the same reason: it has a connotation which may not be true. It sounds like it’s … Continue reading C# 5 async and choosing terminology: why I’m against "yield"

As many of you will have seen yesterday, the major new feature of C# 5 was announced yesterday: support for asynchronous operations with new contextual keywords of "async" and "await". I haven’t had a lot of time to play with them yet, but I have a few initial thoughts. Note that these won’t make any sense to you unless you’ve also watched the talk Anders gave, or read Eric’s blog post, or something similar. Links are at the bottom of this post rather than peppered throughout. Asynchronous != parallel Do you remember when LINQ was first announced, and there was … Continue reading Initial thoughts on C# 5’s async support