How to call any method asynchronously in c#

Question

Could someone please show me a small snippet of code which demonstrates how to call a method asynchronously in c#?

Answer 1

If you use action.BeginInvoke(), you have to call EndInvoke somewhere - else the framework has to hold the result of the async call on the heap, resulting in a memory leak.

If you don't want to jump to C# 5 with the async/await keywords, you can just use the Task Parallels library in .Net 4. It's much, much nicer than using BeginInvoke/EndInvoke, and gives a clean way to fire-and-forget for async jobs:

using System.Threading.Tasks;
...
void Foo(){}
...
new Task(Foo).Start();

If you have methods to call that take parameters, you can use a lambda to simplify the call without having to create delegates:

void Foo2(int x, string y)
{
    return;
}
...
new Task(() => { Foo2(42, "life, the universe, and everything");}).Start();

I'm pretty sure (but admittedly not positive) that the C# 5 async/await syntax is just syntactic sugar around the Task library.

Answer 2

Here's a way to do it:

// The method to call
void Foo()
{
}


Action action = Foo;
action.BeginInvoke(ar => action.EndInvoke(ar), null);

Of course you need to replace Action by another type of delegate if the method has a different signature

Answer 3

Check out the MSDN article Asynchronous Programming with Async and Await if you can afford to play with new stuff. It was added to .NET 4.5.

Example code snippet from the link (which is itself from this MSDN sample code project):

// Three things to note in the signature: 
//  - The method has an async modifier.  
//  - The return type is Task or Task<T>. (See "Return Types" section.)
//    Here, it is Task<int> because the return statement returns an integer. 
//  - The method name ends in "Async."
async Task<int> AccessTheWebAsync()
{ 
    // You need to add a reference to System.Net.Http to declare client.
    HttpClient client = new HttpClient();

    // GetStringAsync returns a Task<string>. That means that when you await the 
    // task you'll get a string (urlContents).
    Task<string> getStringTask = client.GetStringAsync("http://msdn.microsoft.com");

    // You can do work here that doesn't rely on the string from GetStringAsync.
    DoIndependentWork();

    // The await operator suspends AccessTheWebAsync. 
    //  - AccessTheWebAsync can't continue until getStringTask is complete. 
    //  - Meanwhile, control returns to the caller of AccessTheWebAsync. 
    //  - Control resumes here when getStringTask is complete.  
    //  - The await operator then retrieves the string result from getStringTask. 
    string urlContents = await getStringTask;

    // The return statement specifies an integer result. 
    // Any methods that are awaiting AccessTheWebAsync retrieve the length value. 
    return urlContents.Length;
}

Quoting:

If AccessTheWebAsync doesn't have any work that it can do between calling GetStringAsync and awaiting its completion, you can simplify your code by calling and awaiting in the following single statement.

string urlContents = await client.GetStringAsync();

More details are in the link.

Answer 4

Starting with .Net 4.5 you can use Task.Run to simply start an action:

void Foo(string args){}
...
Task.Run(() => Foo("bar"));

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/pfxteam/archive/2011/10/24/10229468.aspx

Answer 5

public partial class MainForm : Form
{
    Image img;
    private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        LoadImageAsynchronously("http://media1.santabanta.com/full5/Indian%20%20Celebrities(F)/Jacqueline%20Fernandez/jacqueline-fernandez-18a.jpg");
    }

    private void LoadImageAsynchronously(string url)
    {
        /*
        This is a classic example of how make a synchronous code snippet work asynchronously.
        A class implements a method synchronously like the WebClient's DownloadData(…) function for example
            (1) First wrap the method call in an Anonymous delegate.
            (2) Use BeginInvoke(…) and send the wrapped anonymous delegate object as the last parameter along with a callback function name as the first parameter.
            (3) In the callback method retrieve the ar's AsyncState as a Type (typecast) of the anonymous delegate. Along with this object comes EndInvoke(…) as free Gift
            (4) Use EndInvoke(…) to retrieve the synchronous call’s return value in our case it will be the WebClient's DownloadData(…)’s return value.
        */
        try
        {
            Func<Image> load_image_Async = delegate()
            {
                WebClient wc = new WebClient();
                Bitmap bmpLocal = new Bitmap(new MemoryStream(wc.DownloadData(url)));
                wc.Dispose();
                return bmpLocal;
            };

            Action<IAsyncResult> load_Image_call_back = delegate(IAsyncResult ar)
            {
                Func<Image> ss = (Func<Image>)ar.AsyncState;
                Bitmap myBmp = (Bitmap)ss.EndInvoke(ar);

                if (img != null) img.Dispose();
                if (myBmp != null)
                    img = myBmp;
                Invalidate();
                //timer.Enabled = true;
            };
            //load_image_Async.BeginInvoke(callback_load_Image, load_image_Async);             
            load_image_Async.BeginInvoke(new AsyncCallback(load_Image_call_back), load_image_Async);             
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {

        }
    }
    protected override void OnPaint(PaintEventArgs e)
    {
        if (img != null)
        {
            Graphics grfx = e.Graphics;
            grfx.DrawImage(img,new Point(0,0));
        }
    }