Visual Basic 2015 Unleashed

Asynchronous I/O File Operations in .NET 4.6

Before .NET Framework 4.5, you could perform asynchronous operations over files and streams by using the Asynchronous Programming Model and methods such as Stream.BeginRead and Stream.EndRead. This kind of approach can be good, but it has the limitations described in the section “Getting Started with Async/Await” in this chapter. With .NET Framework 4.5 and after, asynchronous I/O operations can be simplified by using the Async pattern and by implementing asynchronous versions of methods that work with files and stream to avoid blocking the main thread. Such methods are exposed by the Stream, FileStream, MemoryStream, TextReader, and TextWriter classes that you saw in action back in Chapter 18, “ ...