What is the practical difference among all of these Reactive Observable extensions?

Question

Given a BehaviorSubject, what is the practical difference between calling all of these different functions on it?

• First()
• Last()
• LatestValue()

Answer 1

Thanks @RichardHein for the great answer.

The blocking extension methods should really be moved into their own namespace, so the developer has to specifically choose to include them for a project (or specifically a CS file). You add a ton of complexity with Rx, and by accidentally using a blocking method you're basically devolving back to IList/IEnumerable.

I think this is the biggest mistake the Rx team made, IOW I think by including these by default they missed the 'pit of success' with Rx. Fix this and I'd call Rx the API of choice when moving beyond single-threaded + async in C# (i.e. why .NET is more powerful than say NodeJS).