.NET 4 Cancellation Framework

Posted by Al Tenhundfeld on Jun 03, 2009

Sections

Architecture & Design,

Development,

Enterprise Architecture

Topics

Transactions Processing ,

.NET ,

.NET Framework

Tags

.NET Framework 4.0 ,

Parallel Programming

.NET 4 will have new types to support building cancellation-aware applications and libraries. The new CancellationToken, CancellationTokenSource, and cancellation exception types provide a cooperative cancellation framework.

the motivating principles that the new types were designed to support:

• any unit of work is commenced, it should have a consistent means to support early termination in response to a cancellation request.
• If some unit of work controls various other moving pieces, it should be able to conveniently chain cancellation requests to them.
• Blocking calls should be able to support cancellation.
• Calls to complex operations, such as MoveNext() on a PLINQ
enumerator, should have simple yet comprehensive cancellation support.
• When infrastructure makes calls back to potentially long-running user code, it should be possible for the user code to observe and respond to cancellation requests in a cooperative fashion.
• Cancellation should be an obvious part of an API with clean and consistent semantics.
• Cancellation should not be forceful but instead cooperative.

The framework is built upon two new types:

• CancellationToken
a struct that represents a ‘potential request for cancellation’. This struct is used as an argument to allow methods to poll on it or register a callback to be fired when cancellation is requested.
• CancellationTokenSource
a class that provides the mechanism for initiating a cancellation request. It also provides an association to the related token. This design allows separation of the the two primary cancellation operations: initiating a cancellation request & observing and responding to cancellation. Specifically, methods that accept only a CancellationToken can observe a cancellation request but cannot initiate one.

These new .NET 4 cancellation types provide a framework for building systems that have robust and consistent cancellation behaviors. This will specifically assist with GUIs, applications, and libraries that manage long running or blocking operations. The long-term goal is to reduce the variation and inconsistencies in the current offering of 3rd-party cancellation solutions. These new types will also offer a uniform contract to interoperate with Parallel Extensions.

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