How to call any method asynchronously in c#

c# asynchronous
Thomas picture Thomas · Apr 6, 2011 · Viewed 142.9k times · Source

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

Answer

Drew Shafer picture Drew Shafer · Feb 24, 2012

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.

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