Threading and asynchronous operations in C#

Question

I\'m an old dog trying to learn a new trick. I\'m extremely familiar with a language called PowerBuilder and in that language, when you want to do things asynchronously, you

Answer 1

BlockingCollection makes putting this kind of thing together pretty easy:

// the queue
private BlockingCollection<Message> MessagesQueue = new BlockingCollection<Message>();


// the consumer
private MessageParser()
{
    foreach (var msg in MessagesQueue.GetConsumingEnumerable())
    {
        var parsedMessage = ParseMessage(msg);
        // do something with the parsed message
    }
}

// In your main program
// start the consumer
var consumer = Task.Factory.StartNew(() => MessageParser(),
    TaskCreationOptions.LongRunning);

// the main loop
while (messageAvailable)
{
    var msg = GetMessageFromTcp();
    // add it to the queue
    MessagesQueue.Add(msg);
}

// done receiving messages
// tell the consumer that no more messages will be added
MessagesQueue.CompleteAdding();

// wait for consumer to finish
consumer.Wait();

The consumer does a non-busy wait on the queue, so it's not eating CPU resources when there's nothing available.