Mitch Wheat - Treat the cause, not the symptoms!

Join us at the Perth .NET user group, June 2nd 5:30pm, where Joe Albahari will showcase the magic of C# 5's await and async keywords. You'll see how easy asynchronous programming has become with Microsoft's latest CTP, and how much you can achieve without being a guru in multithreading or monadic calculus.

We'll start with very simple examples to introduce asynchronous programming in general: what exactly is it, how does it differ from multithreading, and why do we need it? Then we'll examine the historical support for asynchronous programming in the .NET Framework and what people are doing right now. You'll see why BackgroundWorker and the event-based pattern are clumsy and often inadequate - and how the APM strikes fear, pain (and ultimately asynchrophobia) into the hearts of the even most hard-core programmers. We'll then demonstrate how the async CTP eliminates the problem almost entirely - allowing you to program as you always have.

• TOPIC:  Introduction to C# 5 async with Joe Albahari
• DATE:   Thursday, June 2nd, 5:30pm - 7:00pm
• VENUE: Enex 100 Seminar Room, Level 3, 100 St Georges Terrace, Perth
• COST:   Free. All welcome

There will be plenty of practical examples - from making a rich client app responsive to writing high-concurrency apps and games. We'll also cover limitations and discuss when you would use this versus Reactive Extensions. The presentation will assume minimum background knowledge and yet will go fairly deep. We'll also look at what the compiler actually does in translating asynchronous calls, and potential extensibility points. This is a great chance to get to grips with an otherwise difficult-to-research topic.

Joe Albahari is a C# MVP and author of C# 4.0 in a Nutshell and LINQPad. He has presented at TechEd and JAOO, and is a regular speaker in the Perth .NET UG. He has an extensive free online resource on .NET multithreading and parallel programming at www.albahari.com/threading/