EntityFramework 6 and async database queries
Microsoft is going all-out on .NET 4.5 and C#5’s async feature. Windows RT (the .NET libraries for interfacing with the windows runtime) makes heavy use of task-based asynchrony in the API, and Microsoft’s rule of thumb to all .NET developers is to make any method that can reasonably be expected to take more than 50ms should be asynchronous. This includes web service requests, file read and save operations, and more.
Given the examples in the previous paragraph, most people will instantly think “Well, what about databases?” (as I did). Indeed, so did Microsoft, and they’ve got us covered. Entity Framework 6.0 (currently in alpha state at time of writing) has been updated to support asynchronous queries. What does this look like? Currently there are five methods that make use of asyncrony – SaveChangesAsync() and ExecuteSqlCommandAsync() for non-queries, and FindAsync(), SingleAsync() and ToListAsync() extension methods for IEnumerable.
I’m looking forward to testing this code out to see how it runs. So far I haven’t used async in production code, but from the work I’ve done on my own personal projects, I can say that I’m very impressed with how well .NET async works as well as how easy it is to use.
Richiban 