Happy New Year, everyone! I'm attempting to make 2012 a quiet year in terms of my speaking engagements - I've turned down a few kind offers already, and I expect to do so again during the year. I may well still give user group talks in evenings if I can do so without having to take holiday, but full conferences are likely to be out, especially international ones. This is partly so I can take more time off to support my wife, Holly, who has her own books to promote. This year will be particularly important[...]

(As usual, I will be sending the publisher a copy of this review to give them and the author a chance to reply to it before I publish it to the blog. Other than including their comments and correcting any factual mistakes they may point out, I don't intend to change the review itself.) Resources: Publisher page (includes source code download) Amazon / Barnes and Noble My unofficial errata and notes A more positive series of review blog posts (just for balance) Introduction and disclaime[...]

In the last post I showed a method to implement "majority voting" for tasks, allowing a result to become available as soon as possible. At the end, I mentioned that I was reasonably confident that it worked because of the unit tests... but I didn't show the tests themselves. I felt they deserved their own post, as there's a bigger point here: it's possible to unit test async code. At least sometimes. Testing code involving asynchrony is generally a pain. Introducing the exact order of events that you want[...]

Note: For the rest of this series, I'll be veering away from the original purpose of the project (investigating what the compiler is up to) in favour of discussing the feature itself. As such, I've added a requirement for AsyncCtpLib.dll - but due to potential distribution restrictions, I've felt it safest not to include that in the source repository. If you're running this code yourself, you'll need to copy the DLL from your installation location into the Eduasync\lib directory before it will build - or c[...]

Ages ago when I wrote my previous Eduasync post, I said we'd look at a pipeline model of coroutines. I've decided to skip that, as I do want to cover the topic of this post, and I've got some more "normal" async ideas to write about too. If you want to look at the pipeline coroutines code, it's project 20 in the source repository. Have fun, and don't blame me if you get confused reading it - so do I. The code I am going to write about is horrible too. It's almost as tricky to understand, and it does far n[...]