Async/Await - The Edge Cases and Unit Testing Presentation

Tonight I gave a short presentation at Devevening titled “Async/Await – The Edge Cases and Unit Testing”. Here’s the abstract:

In this talk we'll look at the new async await feature in C# 5, but we'll go beyond the typical toy examples and look at edge cases like exception handling, task cancellation and how we can approach unit testing asynchronous methods.

I’ve uploaded the source code and slides to a BitBucket repository, so for those who want to inspect the examples at their own leisure, please clone away:

• Source code (specifically revision 394d1e3cf9f5 was used in this talk)
• Presentation slides

I hope to make an extended version of the talk and present that at a future user group; I’d like to cover things in a little more detail, look at the history of async over the life of the .NET Framework, cover unit testing a bit more thoroughly, and maybe even take a peek under the covers at what the compiler generates when you write an async method. Stay tuned!