ParallelExtensionsExtras Tour #16 – Asynchronous Tasks for WebClient, SmtpClient, and Ping

NET 4.0 includes significant advancements for developers writing parallel and concurrent applications, including Parallel LINQ (PLINQ), the Task Parallel Library (TPL), new thread-safe collections, and a variety of new coordination and synchronization data structures.

In this installment of the ParallelExtensionsExtras Tour, the author takes a look at how the Task Parallel Library isn’t just about CPU-bound operations.  The Task class is a great representation for any asynchronous operation, even those implemented purely as asynchronous I/O.

Task’s ability to represent arbitrary asynchronous operations without tying up threads is rooted in the TaskCompletionSource<TResult> class, and this becomes a building block for creating an unlimited number of higher-level asynchronous operations represented as a Task. 

With a method like this, you can very easily download a single file, but you can now also take advantage of the power of the Task class to, for example, download multiple files and perform a follow-up operation asynchronously only when all of the asynchronous downloads have completed, in this case outputting some diagnostic information about each download’s success or failure, e.g.

Check-out Tour #16 – to learn more about Asynchronous Tasks for WebClient, SmtpClient, and Ping: http://blogs.msdn.com/pfxteam/archive/2010/05/04/10007557.aspx

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