In this chapter you’ll:

• Understand what asynchronous programming is and how it can improve the performance of your apps.

• Use the async modifier to indicate that a method is asynchronous.

• Use an await expression to wait for an asynchronous task to complete execution so that an async method can continue its execution.

• Take advantage of multicore processors by executing tasks asynchronously via Task Parallel Library (TPL) features.

• Use Task method WhenAll to wait for multiple tasks to complete before an async method continues.

• Time multiple tasks running on a single-core system and a dual-core system (all with the same processor speeds) to determine the performance improvement when these tasks are run on the dual-core system.

• Use an HttpClient to invoke a web service asynchronously.

• Show an asynchronous task’s progress and intermediate results,