Async Features Now Available for .NET 4 and Silverlight 5

by Jenni Konrad on Apr 30, 2012 |

The new Async Targeting Pack for Visual Studio 11 Beta, just announced by Microsoft, will allow developers to use asynchronous programming features in .NET 4 or Silverlight 5 applications. These features were previously provided in the Async CTP.

Developers seeking to use these features previously had to choose between using Visual Studio 11, or using Visual Studio 2010 with the Async CTP. The Targeting Pack fixes issues with DLL incompatibilities between the Async CTP and Visual Studio 11. It is not supported in Visual Studio 2010.

The async/await keywords and Task-based programming are available in C# and VB. There are some slight variations in the usage of these features in .NET 4 or Silverlight 5 with the Async Targeting Pack versus .NET 4.5. These differences are detailed in the release notes.

As of this release, Microsoft will no longer be updating the Async CTP. The unsupported CTP will remain available for developers working with Windows Phone or Azure applications in Visual Studio 2010, though Microsoft has not specified how long this availability will continue.

The Async Targeting Pack for Visual Studio 11 is available from NuGet under the name Microsoft.CompilerServices.AsyncTargetingPack.

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Microsoft Support for Async CTP by Glen Stone Posted

Re: Microsoft Support for Async CTP by Jonathan Allen Posted

Re: Microsoft Support for Async CTP by Glen Stone Posted

Re: Microsoft Support for Async CTP by Jenni Konrad Posted

Re: Microsoft Support for Async CTP by Glen Stone Posted

Microsoft Support for Async CTP by Glen Stone

"As of this release, Microsoft is ending its support for the Async CTP."

What is your source for this? My understanding was that Async CTP was never supported anyway.

Re: Microsoft Support for Async CTP by Jonathan Allen

The CTP had a Go Live license which confers some support during the preview period. I haven't read this particular license, but in the past it has been mostly informal support such as private bug fixes from their development branch.

Re: Microsoft Support for Async CTP by Glen Stone

Yes, the EULA grants limited rights to production use, however Section 8 says: "Because this software is “as is,” we may not provide support services for it."

But that's not what I'm asking. Where did Microsoft say they were ending support for Async CTP with the release of the targetting pack?

Re: Microsoft Support for Async CTP by Jenni Konrad

You're correct, Glen... it wasn't officially supported. I'm updating to reflect that. Lucian Wischik stated in his post about it that it remains unsupported and will no longer be updated.

Re: Microsoft Support for Async CTP by Glen Stone

Thanks for the clarification and the link to the blog.