Picking up the pace – multithreading data processing

So far, we've only looked at trivial examples of read and write operations on our data streams, and we've only done so with the synchronous Read() and Write() methods. This hasn't been an issue for our 50 or 500 character-long messages and single-purpose test applications. However, it isn't hard to imagine scenarios where the data stream is large enough to take a considerable amount of time just to be read through from start to finish. Imagine requesting a file over FTP that is 200 MB large, or imagine requesting 2 million records from a database table hosted on a remote server. If the process that had to perform those operations was also responsible for responding to user behavior through a graphical interface, the long-running data processing task would render the GUI completely unresponsive. Such...