Month: November 2011

Eduasync part 17: unit testing

By jonskeet

In the last post I showed a method to implement "majority voting" for tasks, allowing a result to become available as soon as possible. At the end, I mentioned that I was reasonably confident that it worked because of the unit tests… but I didn’t show the tests themselves. I felt they deserved their own post, as there’s a bigger point here: it’s possible to unit test async code. At least sometimes. Testing code involving asynchrony is generally a pain. Introducing the exact order of events that you want is awkward, as is managing the threading within tests. With a … Continue reading Eduasync part 17: unit testing

Eduasync part 16: Example of composition: majority voting

By jonskeet

Note: For the rest of this series, I’ll be veering away from the original purpose of the project (investigating what the compiler is up to) in favour of discussing the feature itself. As such, I’ve added a requirement for AsyncCtpLib.dll – but due to potential distribution restrictions, I’ve felt it safest not to include that in the source repository. If you’re running this code yourself, you’ll need to copy the DLL from your installation location into the Eduasync\lib directory before it will build – or change each reference to it. One of the things I love about async is the … Continue reading Eduasync part 16: Example of composition: majority voting

Eduasync part 15: implementing COMEFROM with a horrible hack

By jonskeet

Ages ago when I wrote my previous Eduasync post, I said we’d look at a pipeline model of coroutines. I’ve decided to skip that, as I do want to cover the topic of this post, and I’ve got some more "normal" async ideas to write about too. If you want to look at the pipeline coroutines code, it’s project 20 in the source repository. Have fun, and don’t blame me if you get confused reading it – so do I. The code I am going to write about is horrible too. It’s almost as tricky to understand, and it does … Continue reading Eduasync part 15: implementing COMEFROM with a horrible hack