If you’re writing one of several applications that call for asynchronous programming, this concise hands-on guide shows you how the async feature in C# 5.0 can make the process much simpler. Along with a clear introduction to asynchronous programming, you get an in-depth look at how the async feature works and why you might want to use it in your application.

Written for experienced C# programmers—yet approachable for beginners—this book is packed with code examples that you can extend for your own projects.

• Write your own asynchronous code, and learn how async saves you from this messy chore
• Discover new performance possibilities in ASP.NET web server code
• Explore how async and WinRT work together in Windows 8 applications
• Learn the importance of the await keyword in async methods
• Understand which .NET thread is running your code—and at what points in the program
• Use the Task-based Asynchronous Pattern (TAP) to write asynchronous APIs in .NET
• Take advantage of parallel computing in modern machines
• Measure async code performance by comparing it with alternatives

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction

Chapter 2. Why Programs Need to Be Asynchronous

Chapter 3. Writing Asynchronous Code Manually

Chapter 4. Writing Async Methods

Chapter 5. What await Actually Does

Chapter 6. The Task-Based Asynchronous Pattern

Chapter 7. Utilities for Async Code

Chapter 8. Which Thread Runs My Code?

Chapter 9. Exceptions in Async Code

Chapter 10. Parallelism Using Async

Chapter 11. Unit Testing Async Code

Chapter 12. Async in ASP.NET Applications

Chapter 13. Async in WinRT Applications

Chapter 14. The Async Compiler Transform- in Depth

Chapter 15. The Performance of Async Code

About the Author

 Alex Davies is a coder, blogger and concurrency enthusiast from England. He currently works as a developer and product owner at Red Gate, working on tools for .NET developers. Before that, he did a degree in computer science at Cambridge University, and still has theoretical CS in his blood. In his spare time he writes an open source Actors framework for .NET, to let people write parallel programs more easily.