how to implement async method using Task Parallel Library for I/O operations - parallel-processing

Question

I found that for expensive IO bound operation I can use TaskCompletionSource
as shown here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh873177.aspx#workloads
But the example shown is only waiting for some time and return DateTime.
public static Task<DateTimeOffset> Delay(int millisecondsTimeout)
{
TaskCompletionSource<DateTimeOffset> tcs = null;
Timer timer = null;
timer = new Timer(delegate
{
timer.Dispose();
tcs.TrySetResult(DateTimeOffset.UtcNow);
}, null, Timeout.Infinite, Timeout.Infinite);
tcs = new TaskCompletionSource<DateTimeOffset>(timer);
timer.Change(millisecondsTimeout, Timeout.Infinite);
return tcs.Task;
}
Above code waits for timeout. I have a database call which I want to fire in the above way, but little confused in how to write it:
using (var context = new srdb_sr2_context())
{
return context.GetData("100", "a2acfid");
}
I wrote the function as below, but not sure if this is correct way of doing it:
TaskCompletionSource<IList<InstructorsOut>> tcs = null;
Timer timer = null;
timer = new Timer(delegate
{
timer.Dispose();
//prepare for expensive data call
using (var context = new srdb_sr2_context())
{
var output = context.GetData("100", "a2acfid");
//set the result
tcs.TrySetResult(output);
}
}, null, Timeout.Infinite, Timeout.Infinite);
tcs = new TaskCompletionSource<IList<InstructorsOut>>(timer);
timer.Change(0, Timeout.Infinite);
return tcs.Task;
Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Your code doesn't make much sense to me. Timer is useful if you want to execute the code after some time, but that's not what you need here.
If you want to execute an operation on a background thread, you can use Task.Run():
Task<IList<InstructorsOut>> GetDataBackground()
{
return Task.Run(() =>
{
using (var context = new srdb_sr2_context())
{
return context.GetData("100", "a2acfid");
}
});
}
Using a background thread this way can be useful in UI apps, where you don't want to block the UI thread. But if you have something like ASP.NET application, this won't actually give you any performance or scalability improvements. For that, the GetData() method would have to be made truly asynchronous.