Is there a Task based replacement for System.Threa

Question

I'm new to .Net 4.0's Tasks and I wasn't able to find what I thought would be a Task based replacement or implementation of a Timer, e.g. a periodic Task. Is there such a thing?

Update I came up with what I think is a solution to my needs which is to wrap the "Timer" functionality inside a Task with child Tasks all taking advantage of the CancellationToken and returns the Task to be able to participate in further Task steps.

public static Task StartPeriodicTask(Action action, int intervalInMilliseconds, int delayInMilliseconds, CancellationToken cancelToken)
{ 
    Action wrapperAction = () =>
    {
        if (cancelToken.IsCancellationRequested) { return; }

        action();
    };

    Action mainAction = () =>
    {
        TaskCreationOptions attachedToParent = TaskCreationOptions.AttachedToParent;

        if (cancelToken.IsCancellationRequested) { return; }

        if (delayInMilliseconds > 0)
            Thread.Sleep(delayInMilliseconds);

        while (true)
        {
            if (cancelToken.IsCancellationRequested) { break; }

            Task.Factory.StartNew(wrapperAction, cancelToken, attachedToParent, TaskScheduler.Current);

            if (cancelToken.IsCancellationRequested || intervalInMilliseconds == Timeout.Infinite) { break; }

            Thread.Sleep(intervalInMilliseconds);
        }
    };

    return Task.Factory.StartNew(mainAction, cancelToken);
}      

Answer 1

I ran into a similar problem and wrote a TaskTimer class that returns a seris of tasks that complete on timer: https://github.com/ikriv/tasktimer/.

using (var timer = new TaskTimer(1000).Start())
{
    // Call DoStuff() every second
    foreach (var task in timer)
    {
        await task;
        DoStuff();
    }
}