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,
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Chapter 13. Async in WinRT Applications
For those who aren’t already familiar with WinRT, I’ll give a brief overview of the technology before moving on to explore how async and WinRT work together.
What Is WinRT?
WinRT (or Windows Runtime) is a group of APIs that are used in Windows 8 applications that run on Windows 8 and Windows RT for ARM processors. One of the design goals of the WinRT APIs is responsiveness, achieved by asynchronous programming. All methods that could take longer than 50ms are asynchronous.
It is designed to be used uniformly from three completely different technology stacks: .NET, JavaScript, and native code (usually C++). To achieve this, the APIs are all defined in a common metadata format called WinMD. Each of the languages can then compile against the WinMD definition of the API, without any need for a language-specific wrapper. This system is called projection, where each compiler or interpreter projects the WinRT type to be used as a normal type in the language.
Note
WinMD is based on the .NET assembly metadata format, so the constructs that are available are very similar to .NET: classes interfaces, methods, properties, attributes, etc. There are differences, though; for example, generic types are legal, but generic methods aren’t.
The majority of WinRT is implemented in native code, but you can also write WinRT components in C#, which you or others can then consume from any of the supported languages.
Because the WinRT interfaces are not .NET, the API provided ...
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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.