>>>C# 5! You're killing me! (sigh)
>>>
>>>I guess Bill Wagner gets to write another book.
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>>The one I ordered turned up today. Even without reading it all I can see a lot of real meat in there and have already ordered the Net4 version.......
>>>
>>>OK, tech discussion -- asynchronous methods. I know what asynchronous means so have an idea. How is this a good thing?
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>>Well (now that I've calmed down) I guess I can see that all that asynchronous methods will do is make the implementation of multi-threading code simpler and more readable. Or as you querying the basic benefits of multi-threading in the first place ?
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>
>Many years ago I worked on an application that did almost all updates asynchronously. You and Craig are right that it makes things seem faster to the user. The only downside is the user is left to assume the updates were successful, when that may not be the case.

Plenty of dotnet apps today use asynchronous invocation (or the thread pool when that route is better) the long way but NOT for updates (not the typical meaning of updates anyway). (I'm actually excited about the new options coming out) Think about plotting an address on a map - you want to continue processing and not wait for the map to display the address. Reporting when finishing a step - you don't want to wait to continue while a report pushes out. Maybe you enter a name and you want to check that name against a huge list of names in another backend but not stop whatever you are doing regardless of whether any matches are found. Maybe you have a form with buttons that light up when you enter an address in a control if a match for that address is found someplace else (and clicking those buttons will launch a form that displays those records) and you don't want to sit and wait on that address control until the matches are found and the button is lit or not. There are plenty of uses for it but updates would not be in my list. Basically, when the UI needs to continue or additional processing needs to continue and neither require the immediate results of the method called asynchronously to do so.

Update: Sorry, I think I may have replied to the wrong message in the thread...