What about WCF 4.5 and the async/await pattern?

From what I’ve heard it should be pretty smooth to produce asynchronous server/client code with .net 4.5, so let’s try it out! Defining async methods on the service contract is now a lot cleaner :

[ServiceContract]
public interface IPeopleService
{
	[OperationContract]
	Task<IList<Person>> GetPeople();
}

instead of the wcf 4.0 way which would look something like this :

[ServiceContract]
public interface IPeopleService
{
	[OperationContract(AsyncPattern=true)]
	IAsyncResult BeginGetPeople(AsyncCallback cb, object state);

	[OperationContract]
	IList<Person> GetPeople();

	[OperationContract]
	IList<Person> EndGetPeople(IAsyncResult ar);
}

the server side implementation of the operation when returning a task is straightforward :

public async Task<IList<Person>> GetPeople()
{
	Task t1 = Task.Delay(500);
	Task t2 = Task.Delay(500);
	await Task.WhenAll(t1, t2);

	return await Task.Factory.StartNew(() => people);
}

If you don’t want to await something in the method you can skip the async keyword and still return a Task as shown below, async on a method simply tells the compiler that “I’m going to await something in this method”.

public Task<IList<Person>> GetPeople()
{
	return Task.FromResult(people);
}

Anyways it’s really nice to skip the non-implemented begin/end methods on the server which was simply boiler plating in .net 4.0. For the sake of simplicity the service will be hosted in a console application and for consuming the service I’ve implemented a simple proxy that inherits ClientBase<TChannel> and implements the contract. See the code if this confuses you (which probably means that you’re a noob ;-)). The client code when working with tasks is clean and straightforward as well :

var serviceProxy = new PeopleServiceProxy("PeopleServiceEndpoint");

Task<IList<Person>> people = serviceProxy.GetPeople();
people.ContinueWith(
	x =>
		{
			foreach (Person person in x.Result)
			{
				Console.WriteLine(
					"{0} {1} born {2}",
					person.FirstName,
					person.LastName,
					person.BirthDate.ToShortDateString());
			}
		});

We can control on which thread we will continue by passing in a TaskScheduler. So far so good, so what about testing? I’m using Nunit which integrates really well with VS when using resharper. I want to write an integration test (not unit) to make sure everything works well including the WCF part since unit testing my simple service is too easy ;-) I’ll host the service in the Setup method and take it down in the teardown. A simple test then looks like :

[Test]
public void ShallBeAbleToGetDateTimeFromService()
{
	IPeopleService serviceProxy = new PeopleServiceProxy("PeopleServiceEndpoint");

	Task<IList<Person>> getPeopleTask = serviceProxy.GetPeople();
	getPeopleTask.Wait();

	IList<Person> result = getPeopleTask.Result;

	Assert.IsNotNull(result);
	Assert.AreEqual(2, result.Count);

	(serviceProxy as IDisposable).Dispose();
}

Obviously we’d use facades to call on services in a real application but the principle is the same. It doesn’t get much cleaner than this imo.

/A

Get the code here! (67KB)