C# 5.0 Unleashed

Introduction to Reactive Programming

To finish off this chapter, we take a brief look at recent evolutions in the space of reactive, event-based programming. With distributed programs becoming more and more omnipresent, the importance of reactive programming is steadily increasing. Think of technologies such as AJAX, which emphasize the asynchronous nature of communications to prevent keeping the user waiting for a network operation to complete.

When writing code that kicks off an asynchronous request and handles its completion, we’re dealing with one form of reactive programming: single-value asynchronous programming. To handle the eventual completion of such a request, different patterns emerged over the years.

One such pattern is the Asynchronous ...