Building Responsive .NET Applications with Microsoft Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR)

July 23, 2009
By Jeffrey Juday

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AsyncCallBackFactory

I borrowed the idea behind this class from the "Concurrent Affairs Concurrency and Control Runtime" article You can access the article in the Resources section at the end of the article. AsyncCallBackFactory appears below.

  sealed class AsyncCallbackFactory
  {
  //Wires the Ports to the Callback function so when async completes
  //the results are posted to a port.
  public static PingCompletedEventHandler Create(Port<PINGCOMPLETEDEVENTARGS> portResult,
     Port<PINGEXCEPTIONINFO> portException)
  {
      AsyncCallbackMethodAdapter builder =
         new AsyncCallbackMethodAdapter(portResult, portException);
      return builder.CompletedCallBack;
  }
  
  //This class wires the ports to the callback method
  private sealed class AsyncCallbackMethodAdapter
  {
      private Port<PINGCOMPLETEDEVENTARGS> _portResult;
      private Port<PINGEXCEPTIONINFO> _portException;
  
      internal AsyncCallbackMethodAdapter(Port<PINGCOMPLETEDEVENTARGS> portResult,
         Port<PINGEXCEPTIONINFO> portException)
      {
          _portResult = portResult;
          _portException = portException;
      }
  
      // Called to process result of completion
      internal void CompletedCallBack(object sender, PingCompletedEventArgs e)
      {
          if (e.Error == null)
          {
              // Post success item to success Port
              _portResult.Post(e);
          }
          else
          {
              PingExceptionInfo info = new PingExceptionInfo();
  
              info.Ex = e.Error;
              info.resource = e.UserState.ToString();
  
              //Send the error object
              _portException.Post(info);
          }
      }
  }
  
  }

As I stated earlier, the class returns a function matching the PingCompletedEventFunction delegate. Essentially, the Create function returns a reference to the CompletedCallBack function inside a private class called AsyncCallBackMethodAdapter which is known only to the AsyncCallBackFactory class.

This may be an odd way of implementing this, but consider other APM operations you may be performing using other classes in the .NET Framework. Most APM "End" functions result in success or an Exception. It may be useful to handle them all in a similar way and to have an overloaded static Create function for each APM class' operation. If an assignment is repeated why not perform the process once and be done with it? Also using an intermediate class allows for some common processing before posting to the Ports.

Further Investigation

There is quite a bit more to CCR. Here are examples of other CCR features not demonstrated in the example code.

Policies allow a DispatcherQueue to throttle message processing. Policies are useful when only a handful of the most recent messages make sense to process and older messages should be ignored. Timers are another useful CCR feature. Utilize timers when a queue must receive a message before an elapsed span of time and perform an alternative action if the time expires first. Joins allow a developer to chain response dependencies together. For example, a Join allows a developer to configure a response when a particular number of Ports are activated. In a future article, I'll demonstrate how I applied CCR to a MSMQ solution.

Conclusion

Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR) originated in Robotics Studio, but can be leveraged outside of Robotics. In fact, CCR is a great platform for the .NET Framework Asynchronous Programming Model (APM). In this article I demonstrated how CCR can work with the .Net Ping class' APM functions.