Async in C# 5.0

Preface

1. Introduction
-Asynchronous Programming
-What's So Great About Asynchronous Code?
-What Is Async?
-What Async Does
-Async Doesn't Solve Everything

2. Why Programs Need to Be Asynchronous
-Desktop User Interface Applications
-Web Application Server Code
-Silverlight, Windows Phone, and Windows 8
-Parallel Code
-An Example

3. Writing Asynchronous Code Manually
-Some Asynchronous Patterns Used in .NET
-The Simplest Asynchronous Pattern
-An Introduction to Task
-The Problem with Manual Asynchrony
-Converting the Example to Use Manual Asynchronous Code

4. Writing Async Methods
-Converting the Favicon Example to Async
-Task and await
-Async Method Return Types
-Async, Method Signatures, and Interfaces
-The return Statement in Async Methods
-Async Methods Are Contagious
-Async Anonymous Delegates and Lambdas

5. What await Actually Does
-Hibernating and Resuming a Method
-The State of the Method
-Context
-Where await Can't Be Used
-Exception Capture
-Async Methods Are Synchronous Until Needed

6. The Task-Based Asynchronous Pattern
-What the TAP Specifies
-Using Task for Compute-Intensive Operations
-Creating a Puppet Task
-Interacting with Old Asynchronous Patterns
-Cold and Hot Tasks
-Up-Front Work

7. Utilities for Async Code
-Delaying for a Period of Time
-Waiting for a Collection of Tasks
-Waiting for Any One Task from a Collection
-Creating Your Own Combinators
-Cancelling Asynchronous Operations
-Returning Progress During an Asynchronous Operation

8. Which Thread Runs My Code?
-Before the First await
-During the Asynchronous Operation
-SynchronizationContext in Detail