Skip to main content

Implementing Asynchronous Callbacks with Task Parallel Library

Bored again...so thought of posting how you can implement callback with Task Parallel Library (TPL).

So what am I talking here, basically I start a task in one thread and I want it to call another method once it completes (Asynchronous callbacks ).

Here is a sample code....

Task<int> parent = new Task<int>(
() =>
{
Console.WriteLine("In parent");
return 100; }
);


Task<int> child = parent.ContinueWith( a =>
{
Console.WriteLine("In Child");
return 19 + a.Result;
});

parent.Start()

Console.WriteLine(child.Result);

The code explains it all, all I have to do is create the task and then call its ContinueWith method and register the callback, its important to note that the parent task is an input to the continuation callback and the result of the parent can be accessed by the callback.

The callback is again another Task, so it does not block the calling thread.
The callback in TPL gives you more flexibility, in the way you want the callback to be invoked, for an example I can specify that I want the callback to be invoked only if the parent did not run successfully to the end.

I can re-write the above code to do that exactly by passing in a TaskContinuationOptions option as the 2nd parameter of the ContinueWith method.

Task<int> parent = new Task<int>(
() =>
{
Console.WriteLine("In parent");
return 100; }
);


Task<int> child = parent.ContinueWith( a =>
{
Console.WriteLine("In Child");
return 19 + a.Result;
},
TaskContinuationOptions.NotOnRanToCompletion
);

parent.Start()

Console.WriteLine(child.Result);

The option is bitwise so I can specify several options demarcated by the pipe line. A few important options would be NotOnCanceled, OnlyOnRanToCompletion, OnlyOnFaulted etc

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Hosting WCF services on IIS or Windows Services?

There came one of those questions from the client whether to use II7 hosting or windows service hosting for WCF services. I tried recollecting a few points and thought of writing it down. WCF applications can be hosted in 2 main ways - In a Windows service - On IIS 7 and above When WCF was first released, IIS 6 did not support hosting WCF applications that support Non-HTTP communication like Net.TCP or Net.MSMQ and developers had to rely on hosting these services on Windows Services. With the release of IIS 7, it was possible to deploy these Non-Http based applications also on IIS 7. Following are the benefits of using IIS 7 to host WCF applications Less development effort Hosting on Windows service, mandates the creating of a Windows service installer project on windows service and writing code to instantiate the service, whereas the service could just be hosted on IIS by creating an application on IIS, no further development is needed, just the service implementa

The maximum nametable character count quota (16384) has been exceeded

Some of our services were growing and the other day it hit the quote, I could not update the service references, nor was I able to run the WCFTest client. An error is diplayed saying " The maximum nametable character count quota (16384) has been exceeded " The problem was with the mex endpoint, where the XML that was sent was too much for the client to handle, this can be fixed by do the following. Just paste the lines below within the configuration section of the devenve.exe.config and the svcutil.exe.config files found at the locations C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE , C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\bin Restart IIS and you are done. The detailed error that you get is the following : Error: Cannot obtain Metadata from net.tcp://localhost:8731/ Services/SecurityManager/mex If this is a Windows (R) Communication Foundation service to which you have access, please check that you have enabled metadata publishing at the specified address. F

Finalization, Know What it Costs

This is a post about object finalization in .NET. Finalization is not as inexpensive as we think, it increases the pressure put on GC.All objects that need finalization are moved into a finalizable queue and the actual finalization happens in a separate thread. Because the objects full state may be needed, the object itself and all the object it points to are promoted to the next generation (this is needed so that GC does not clean these objects off in the current round), and these objects are cleaned up only after the following GC. Due to this reason, resources that need to be released should be wrapped in as small a finalizable object as possible, for instance if your class needs a reference to an unmanaged resource, then you should wrap the unmanaged resource in a separate finalizable class and make that a member of your class and furthermore the parent should be a non-finalizable class. This approach will assure that only the wrapped class (class that contains the unmanaged resourc