September 2012
Beginner to intermediate
104 pages
2h 19m
English
Content preview from Async in C# 5.0Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 2. Why Programs Need to Be Asynchronous
Asynchronous programming is important and useful, but the reason that it’s important varies, depending on what kind of application you’re writing. Some of the benefits exist everywhere, but matter most in a kind of application that you may never write. If this applies to you, do read the whole chapter, as the background knowledge will help you to understand the whole context.
Desktop User Interface Applications
Desktop applications have one primary performance requirement. They need to feel responsive to the user. Human Computer Interaction (HCI) studies have shown that users don’t notice a slow application, as long as the interface is responsive, and preferably has an animated progress indicator.
People get frustrated with the program when it freezes up. Freezes are usually the result of the program being unable to respond to user input during a long-running operation, whether that’s during a slow computation, or during some input/output (IO) operation, like a network access.
The UI frameworks that you might use from C# all operate using a single UI thread. This includes:
WinForms
WPF
Silverlight
That UI thread is the only one that can control the contents of a particular window. It is also the only thread that checks for user actions and responds to them. If the thread is ever busy or blocked for more than a few tens of milliseconds, users will notice that the application feels sluggish.
Asynchronous code, even written manually, means that ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.