A blog by Devendra Tewari
async/await makes asynchronous programming tremendously easy, that is, if you are a .NET programmer. It has taken me a while to get around to learning to use them. I wanted to share their power with a simple example, based on a Windows Forms app that has just two buttons. One button does something, the other cancels it.
Here’s the source code in C#
CancellationTokenSource source;
private void doSomethingButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
source = new System.Threading.CancellationTokenSource();
CancellationToken token = source.Token;
DoSomethingAsync(token);
}
async void DoSomethingAsync(CancellationToken token)
{
// invoke not required, we are still in the main thread
doSomethingButton.Enabled = false;
// do other quick work here...
int count = 0;
// this is where we depart from the main thread
await System.Threading.Tasks.Task.Run(delegate
{
for (count = 0; count < 1000000000; count++)
if (token.IsCancellationRequested) break;
});
// invoke not required, we are back to the main thread
MessageBox.Show(String.Format("Counted till {0}", count));
doSomethingButton.Enabled = true;
}
private void cancelButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
source.Cancel();
}
Clicking on doSomethingButton invokes event handler doSomethingButton_Click, where we create a CancellationTokenSource and pass its CancellationToken to method DoSomethingAsync. The latter is adorned with async. In it, we create a long running Task (worker thread) at some point, that will end either when we are done, or when cancellation is requested by clicking cancelButton. The method itself returns to doSomethingButton_Click at the point it encounters the await keyword. An interesting bit of trickery happens at that point. All the statements that follow await will run in the original thread’s context when the Task is done. Pretty neat, isn’t it?
If you want to convert your synchronous code to asynchronous, I recommend reading Best Practices in Asynchronous Programming.