FireAndForget a Task with AggressiveInlining

When working with tasks you will get a warning if you do not use a task returned from a method. However, you might actually want to fire and forget that task. So what do you do?

One option is to create an extension method for your task to mark it as fire and forget. Aside from removing the warning, it also gives you the nice ability to find all usages.

When creating this method it is a good idea to mark it with the aggressive inlining attribute. This will cause the compiler to try and inline the method to try and optimize performance.

Implementation and Unit Test

public static class TaskExtensions

{

    [MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.AggressiveInlining)]

    public static void FireAndForget(this Task task)

    {

        // Do Nothing

    }

}

public class TaskExtensionTests

{

    [Fact]

    public void FireAndForget()

    {

        Task

            .Delay(100)

            .ContinueWith(t =>

            {

                // TODO: Stuff!

            })

            .FireAndForget();

    }

}

Enjoy,
Tom

Waiting for Events with Tasks in .NET

Would you like to just await the next time that an event fires? It takes a little setup, but you can!

Migrating your code from using an Event-based Asynchronous Pattern to an Task-based Asynchronous Pattern can be very tricky. You can use the TaskCompletionSource to manage your Task, and then you just need to create the wire up around registering and unregistering your event handler. Unfortunately this process is not nearly as generic as I would like.

Event-based Asynchronous Pattern Tests

Here is a way of waiting for an event to fire by simply sleeping while we wait.

This is a terrible solution because we can not know how long we will have to wait for the event. This means we have to wait for one long time period, or we have to periodically poll to see if the event has fired.

public delegate void SingleParamTestDelegate(int key, string value);