Chapter 5. Asynchronous Programming

Writing applications that are non-blocking or reacting to events is increasingly becoming important in this cloud world we live in. A modern application needs to carry out a rich user interaction, communicate with web services, react to notifications, and so on, which is why it is said that the execution of reactive applications is controlled by events. Asynchronous programming is characterized by many simultaneously pending reactions to internal or external events. These reactions may or may not be processed in parallel.

In .NET, both C#, and F# provide an asynchronous programming experience through keywords and syntaxes. In this chapter, we will go through the asynchronous programming model in F#, with a bit of cross-referencing or comparison drawn with the C# world.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• What the asynchronous workflows are and how to create them
• The main functions in the FSharp.Core Async module to manipulate Async...