What are the major risks vs. benefits of using VS2010 Async CTP?

Question

I\'d like to use Visual Studio Async CTP (Version 3) for developing and testing in VS2010 SP1 on Windows XP SP3 mainly because my clients (as well as I) on Windows XP SP3. G

Answer 1

I second @CodesInChaos' recommendation that you develop using VS2012. I use VS2012 on Windows 7 to develop .NET 4 apps running on Windows XP, and it works fine. The only caveat is that you can't debug on .NET 4 (you actually run on the .NET 4.5 runtime), but for 99% of the cases that doesn't matter.

I did use Async CTP in production; I considered it surprisingly stable for a CTP. That said, there are some known bugs. Most notable was the ordering of operations around await expressions. So follow the guideline of only having one await per statement, and make the await expression your top-level expression, e.g.:

var result = await ...;

I believe Jon Skeet also uncovered some more obscure bugs during his eduasync series.

There is no list of Async CTP bugs that have been fixed, or that still exist (in Microsoft.Bcl.Async). There may be some list inside Microsoft, but no one else knows it.

The application is based on TPL, WPF dealing with asynchronously coming from the internet (stock exchange) data flows.

In that case, consider Rx. Rx is fully supported on .NET 4, though I believe it does require VS2012 for development.