async void – How to Tame the Asynchronous Nightmare

You're an intermediate dotnet programmer and you mostly know your way around using Tasks. You sprinkle async and await through your code, and everything is working just as expected. You've heard time and time again that you always want the return types of your asynchronous methods to be a Task (or Task<T>) and that async void is essentially the root of all evil. No sweat. One day you go to wire up an event handler using the syntax myObject.SomeEvent += SomeEventHandler, and your event handler needs to await some asynchronous code. You take all of the right steps and change your method signature to get that beautiful async Task added in, replacing void. But suddenly you get a compile error about your event handler not being compatible. You feel trapped. You're scared. And then you do the unspeakable... You change…

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Tasks, BackgroundWorkers, and Threads – Simple Comparisons for Concurrency

(This article is intended to be a spiritual successor to this previous entry, and now includes Tasks!) Even if you're new to C#, you've probably come across at least one of Tasks, Threads, or BackgroundWorkers. With a bit of additional time, it's likely you've seen all three in your journey. They're all ways to run concurrent code in C# and each has its own set of pros and cons. In this article, we will explore how each one operates at a high level. It's worth noting that in most modern .NET applications and libraries you'll see things converging to Tasks. The Approach I've gone ahead and created a test application that you can find here. Because this is in source control, it's possible/likely that it will diverge from what we see in this article, so I just wanted to offer…

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C# Dev Connect 1 – Intro To Threading

C# Dev Connect 1: Intro to Threading In my last post, I mentioned we'd be hosting a C# Dev Connect meetup at our Magnet Forensics HQ in Waterloo. I figured I'd post to talk about how the event went so that if you couldn't make it, you'll have an idea for next time (and if you did make it, maybe you can comment on how you thought the event went). Our first Dev Connect was lead by a colleague of mine, Chris Sippel, who wanted to give a talk on threading basics in C#. Threading can quickly become a really complex topic, so Chris wanted to keep it high level and talk about the different approaches you can use to start threading in your C# applications. https://twitter.com/Chris_Sippel/status/557655585492328450 Dev Connect: Before the Talk Before Chris gave his talk on threading, we…

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