Asynchronous Processing

Asynchronous Processing

C# Programming context

To understand what is Asynchronous Processing, the prerequisite is to understand what is Synchronous Processing.

Basically, there are two main things involved in this:

1. Client
2. Server

Client: Sends the request to a server and keeps waiting until it receives the response. During the process, it keeps loading and needs a constant connection to the server.

Server: It processes the request received by the client and sends the response. If the process is long-running, sometimes the server goes out of memory or shows timeout error. Due to this, it is not suitable or recommended for long-running operations.

There are multiple problems with this approach... Let's discuss a few of them:

1. Bad user experience
2. The server needs to be very powerful as it may need to work on concurrent requests
3. Server consumes a lot of resources

To overcome this problem, Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 introduces a new Task Parallel Library (TPL) for parallel computing and asynchronous programming.

The namespace is "System.Threading.Tasks".
Here, we need to do it all manually. So this is again a tedious task.

So to solve this problem Microsoft came up with async / await in C# 5 in .Net 4.5 under System.Threading.Tasks.Task
This is pretty much good and could solve the issues like blocking client screen.

Asynchronous processing means "Fire & Forget"... Just sit back and wait...

In this client sends the request and forget about it. Later it checks whether my request is completed or not.

Because of this waiting at the client-side reduced drastically.

This is the typical flow of Asynchronous processing. Here we are going to talk about the infrastructure provided by Azure for implementing the same.


Reference:
1.  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/patterns/async-request-reply
2.  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service-bus-messaging/service-bus-async-messaging
3.  https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/84c85b/asynchronous-programming-with-C-Sharp-5-0/
4.  https://docs.plm.automation.siemens.com/content/pl4x/18.1/T4EA/en_US/Teamcenter_Gateway-Technical_Connectivity_Guide/synchronous_vs_asynchronous.html