Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform, Fifth Edition

19.3. The Asynchronous Nature of Delegates

If you are new to the topic of multithreading, you may wonder what exactly an asynchronous method invocation is all about. As you are no doubt fully aware, some programming operations take time. Although the previous Add() was purely illustrative in nature, imagine that you built a single-threaded application that is invoking a method on a remote object, performing a long-running database query, downloading a large document, or writing 500 lines of text to an external file. While performing these operations, the application will appear to hang for some amount of time. Until the task at hand has been processed, all other aspects of this program (such as menu activation, toolbar clicking, or console output) ...