Preface; Intended Audience; How to Read This Book; Conventions Used in This Book; Using Code Examples; Safari® Books Online; How to Contact Us; Acknowledgments;Chapter 1: Introduction; 1.1 Asynchronous Programming; 1.2 What's So Great About Asynchronous Code?; 1.3 What Is Async?; 1.4 What Async Does; 1.5 Async Doesn't Solve Everything;Chapter 2: Why Programs Need to Be Asynchronous; 2.1 Desktop User Interface Applications; 2.2 Web Application Server Code; 2.

3 Silverlight, Windows Phone, and Windows 8; 2.4 Parallel Code; 2.5 An Example;Chapter 3: Writing Asynchronous Code Manually; 3.1 Some Asynchronous Patterns Used in .NET; 3.2 The Simplest Asynchronous Pattern; 3.3 An Introduction to Task; 3.4 The Problem with Manual Asynchrony; 3.

5 Converting the Example to Use Manual Asynchronous Code;Chapter 4: Writing Async Methods; 4.1 Converting the Favicon Example to Async; 4.2 Task and await; 4.3 Async Method Return Types; 4.4 Async, Method Signatures, and Interfaces; 4.5 The return Statement in Async Methods; 4.6 Async Methods Are Contagious; 4.7 Async Anonymous Delegates and Lambdas;Chapter 5: What await Actually Does; 5.

1 Hibernating and Resuming a Method; 5.2 The State of the Method; 5.3 Context; 5.4 Where await Can't Be Used; 5.5 Exception Capture; 5.6 Async Methods Are Synchronous Until Needed;Chapter 6: The Task-Based Asynchronous Pattern; 6.1 What the TAP Specifies; 6.2 Using Task for Compute-Intensive Operations; 6.

3 Creating a Puppet Task; 6.4 Interacting with Old Asynchronous Patterns; 6.5 Cold and Hot Tasks; 6.6 Up-Front Work;Chapter 7: Utilities for Async Code; 7.1 Delaying for a Period of Time; 7.2 Waiting for a Collection of Tasks; 7.3 Waiting for Any One Task from a Collection; 7.4 Creating Your Own Combinators; 7.

5 Cancelling Asynchronous Operations; 7.6 Returning Progress During an Asynchronous Operation;Chapter 8: Which Thread Runs My Code?; 8.1 Before the First await; 8.2 During the Asynchronous Operation; 8.3 SynchronizationContext in Detail; 8.4 await and SynchronizationContext; 8.5 The Lifecycle of an Async Operation; 8.6 Choosing Not to Use SynchronizationContext; 8.

7 Interacting with Synchronous Code;Chapter 9: Exceptions in Async Code; 9.1 Exceptions in Async Task-Returning Methods; 9.2 Unobserved Exceptions; 9.3 Exceptions in Async void Methods; 9.4 Fire and Forget; 9.5 AggregateException and WhenAll; 9.6 Throwing Exceptions Synchronously; 9.7 finally in Async Methods;Chapter 10: Parallelism Using Async; 10.

1 await and locks; 10.2 Actors; 10.3 Using Actors in C#; 10.4 Task Parallel Library Dataflow;Chapter 11: Unit Testing Async Code; 11.1 The Problem with Unit Testing in Async; 11.2 Writing Working Async Tests Manually; 11.3 Using Unit Test Framework Support;Chapter 12: Async in ASP.NET Applications; 12.

1 Advantages of Asynchronous Web Server Code; 12.2 Using Async in ASP.NET MVC 4; 12.3 Using Async in Older Versions of ASP.NET MVC; 12.4 Using Async in ASP.NET Web Forms;Chapter 13: Async in WinRT Applications; 13.1 What Is WinRT?; 13.

2 IAsyncAction and IAsyncOperation; 13.3 Cancellation; 13.4 Progress; 13.5 Providing Asynchronous Methods in a WinRT Component;Chapter 14: The Async Compiler Transform--in Depth; 14.1 The stub Method; 14.2 The State Machine Struct; 14.3 The MoveNext Method; 14.4 Writing Custom Awaitable Types; 14.

5 Interacting with the Debugger;Chapter 15: The Performance of Async Code; 15.1 Measuring Async Overhead; 15.2 Async Versus Blocking for a Long-Running Operation; 15.3 Optimizing Async Code for a Long-Running Operation; 15.4 Async Versus Manual Asynchronous Code; 15.5 Async Versus Blocking Without a Long-Running Operation; 15.6 Optimizing Async Code Without a Long-Running Operation; 15.7 Async Performance Summary;.