Is LogicalOperationStack incompatible with async in .Net 4.5

Question

Trace.CorrelationManager.LogicalOperationStack enables having nested logical operation identifiers where the most common case is logging (NDC). Should it still work

Answer 1

Yes, LogicalOperationStack should work with async-await and it is a bug that it doesn't.

I've contacted the relevant developer at Microsoft and his response was this:

"I wasn't aware of this, but it does seem broken. The copy-on-write logic is supposed to behave exactly as if we'd really created a copy of the ExecutionContext on entry into the method. However, copying the ExecutionContext would have created a deep copy of the CorrelationManager context, as it's special-cased in CallContext.Clone(). We don't take that into account in the copy-on-write logic."

Moreover, he recommended using the new System.Threading.AsyncLocal class added in .Net 4.6 instead which should handle that issue correctly.

So, I went ahead and implemented LogicalFlow on top of an AsyncLocal instead of the LogicalOperationStack using VS2015 RC and .Net 4.6:

public static class LogicalFlow
{
    private static AsyncLocal _asyncLogicalOperationStack = new AsyncLocal();

    private static Stack AsyncLogicalOperationStack
    {
        get
        {
            if (_asyncLogicalOperationStack.Value == null)
            {
                _asyncLogicalOperationStack.Value = new Stack();
            }

            return _asyncLogicalOperationStack.Value;
        }
    }

    public static Guid CurrentOperationId =>
        AsyncLogicalOperationStack.Count > 0
            ? (Guid)AsyncLogicalOperationStack.Peek()
            : Guid.Empty;

    public static IDisposable StartScope()
    {
        AsyncLogicalOperationStack.Push(Guid.NewGuid());
        return new Stopper();
    }

    private static void StopScope() =>
        AsyncLogicalOperationStack.Pop();
}

And the output for the same test is indeed as it should be:

00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000
    ae90c3e3-c801-4bc8-bc34-9bccfc2b692a
    ae90c3e3-c801-4bc8-bc34-9bccfc2b692a
    ae90c3e3-c801-4bc8-bc34-9bccfc2b692a
00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000