TaskCompletionSource

Posted By: Phil Pennington | Nov 12th, 2009 @ 9:06 AM | 34,026 Views | 3 Comments
Join Danny Shih as he introduces the TaskCompletionSource<TResult> type.  He’ll cover basic usage and walk through a full scenario

Learn more about the .NET Framework 4 and keep abreast of Parallel Computing tools and techniques via the Concurrency Dev Center.

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#Nov 13th, 2009 @ 12:56 PM
Flynn0r
Flynn0r
Passionate about code

Very nice, thank you

#Nov 14th, 2009 @ 6:34 AM
cgillum
cgillum

Perhaps I need to do more research on the new Task APIs, but I didn't quite understand why we would use a TaskCompletionSource<T> instead of using the EAP functionality directly.  Is it because the Task APIs give us better tooling/functionality than EAP?

#Nov 14th, 2009 @ 10:08 AM
Toub
Toub

Hi cgillum-

 

This was just an example Danny was providing on how TCS<T> could be used to represent any asynchronous operation, including EAP implementations.  However, the compositionality provided by Task<T> now allows you to start doing some really useful things.   For example, if you wanted to download a bunch of web pages asynchronously and then only do something when all of them were complete, with WebClient by itself you'd have to code up that logic manually; in contrast, if you had a Task<T> for each download, you could then use ContinueWhenAll to launch additional work when all of those downloads completed (and you'd get back a Task that represents that continuation).  In short, once you have a Task<T> to represent the EAP operation, you can compose it with any other tasks you might have, and you have the full functionality afforded to tasks to process that EAP operation.

 

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