Async/Await

There’s a ton of information about async await support in .NET 4.5.  I don’t want to go over all the best practices and gotchas in this post, but I did want to point out one common trend I’ve seen lately, which is handling async await exceptions.

Await or forget about it

Any async method that returns a Task or Task<T>, you should always await the result.

If you do not await, any exceptions that occur in the calling method will be swallowed.  Essentially you are turning the method call into a fire and forget.

Async Await Exceptions Example

Below is a simple example that demonstrates two behaviors of calling await on an async.  

To run the example, just copy and paste in a new console application.  If you run with the debugger, you should notice the following:

1. MethodCallWithoutAwait will be called, however no exception will be raised in the debugger because await is not called.
2. MethodCallWithAwait will be called and the exception will be raised in the debugger because await is called.

Async Lambdas

There be dragons!  Next post I’ll explore of using async lambdas and how you need to pay close attention in order to avoid creating a void lambda.

In a couple previous posts I’ve discussed using Query Objects instead of Repositories and the Mediator pattern.  I find creating query objects being used with the command pattern much cleaner than polluting repositories with a ton of query methods.

The concept is nothing new as many people already use the command pattern in the context of executing commands/behavior following CQRS.   However, there is nothing wrong with using the same patterns for the query side.

I’ve been using my own home grown solution of the mediator pattern in a few different projects but had nothing really formalized.  I was thinking about creating a simple library until I stumbled upon MediatR created by Jimmy Bogard.

It is incredibly simple and only has one dependency, CommonServiceLocator.

The Github repo has a good set of docs and some examples with different dependency injection containers.

Unity RegisterType

I did notice the Unity example didn’t quiet work as described in the example.

The Mediator class takes a ServiceLocatorProvider in its constructor which was not being resolved properly by Unity.

In order to get it functioning correctly, I defined an injection factory and created the Mediator and passed in the UnityServiceLocator.

My complete Unity configuration which is also using MediatR to publish events from NEventStore:

MediatR v2.0

Although v1 has a dependency on CommonServiceLocator, it appears that v2.0 will not have any external dependencies.