Asynchronous Programming in .Net: Async and Await for Beginners

Introduction There are several ways of doing asynchronous programming in .Net.  Visual Studio 2012 introduces a new approach using the 'await' and 'async' keywords.  These tell the compiler to construct task continuations in quite an unusual way. I found them quite difficult to understand using the Microsoft documentation, which annoyingly keeps saying how easy they …

Why Starting a New Task in the Task Parallel Library (TPL) Doesn’t Always Start a New Thread

The Task Parallel Library in .Net is a wonderful resource.  However, one thing that is a little confusing is that it is actually possible to start a task that runs on the same thread as the current code.  That is, we can do Task.StartNew and it still runs on the same thread.  This isn't the …