Is it a best practice to call methods asynchronously by using delegates?

Question

This msdn article is entitled "How to call a Visual C# method asynchronously" .

The article says "Asynchronous calls are made by using delegates" to which I reply in my head "not necessarily, that's only one way to do it".

The matter-of-fact tone of the articles statement makes me wonder - Is it a best practice, or does MS consider it a best practice, to use delegates when making asynchronous calls?

Answer 1

Up to the current .NET version, asynchronous methods have typically been handled in separate background threads from the one you trigger them from, so it's been mostly essential to do it using a delegate that you can invoke in another thread.

However, with the recent C# Async CTP (which will probably be in C# 5.0 or another future version), the story is changed a little - it's not essential to use delegates, you can write code in a traditional imperative style, and the compiler will do most of the work for you. This might involve delegates, but not necessarily - the compiler does some clever tricks and writes a finite state machine which can be used to execute code asynchronously.

Answer 2

Yes, delegates are the way to call methods asynchronously . It is not best practice, that is how it is done. In .NET, you must use a delegate.

Answer 3

Somebody can tell me im wrong please but i've been under the impression at compile time a delegate is as good as a method, the purpose of a delegate being a signature definition. I can think of no other way of executing async code without a method even if its anonymous which becomes a method at compile time..