Pro Asynchronous Programming with .NET

Pro Asynchronous Programming with .NET teaches the essential skill of asynchronous programming in .NET. It answers critical questions in .NET application development, such as: how do I keep my program responding at all times to keep my users happy? how do I make the most of the available hardware? how can I improve performance?

In the modern world, users expect more and more from their applications and devices, and multi-core hardware has the potential to provide it. But it takes carefully crafted code to turn that potential into responsive, scalable applications.

With Pro Asynchronous Programming with .NET you will:

• Meet the underlying model for asynchrony on Windows—threads.
• Learn how to perform long blocking operations away from your UI thread to keep your UI responsive, then weave the results back in as seamlessly as possible.
• Master the async/await model of asynchrony in .NET, which makes asynchronous programming simpler and more achievable than ever before.
• Solve common problems in parallel programming with modern async techniques.
• Get under the hood of your asynchronous code with debugging techniques and insights from Visual Studio and beyond.

What you’ll learn

• How threads make asynchrony possible in .NET
• The costs and benefits of different synchronization primitives
• How to make the most of the async and await keywords for easier management of asynchronous operations
• How to use an asynchronous model to scale processing across multiple cores
• The different demands of IO and CPU bound processing
• Debugging multithreaded code effectively

Who this book is for

Pro Asynchronous Programming with .NET is for the .NET developer who wants to get more out of the platform. It’s for the UI developer who finds their applications feel unresponsive. It’s for the server-side developer who is struggling to scale their systems. It’s for the developer who is being given more data to process and less time to do it in. Pro Asynchronous Programming with .NET is for people who want to solve problems but also understand how and why the solutions work.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction to Asynchronous Programming
Chapter 2: The Evolution of the .NET Asynchronous API
Chapter 3: Tasks
Chapter 4: Basic Thread Safety
Chapter 5: Concurrent Data Structures and Primitives
Chapter 6: Fast and Fluid: Building a Responsive UI
Chapter 7: Async the .NET 4.5 Way – async and await
Chapter 8: Everything is a Task
Chapter 9: Server-side Async
Chapter 10: Parallel Programming
Chapter 11: Data Flow Constructs
Chapter 12: Task scheduling
Chapter 13: Debugging Async with Visual Studio
Chapter 14: Debugging Async Beyond Visual Studio