Summary

In short, mobile applications should not be designed to undertake long-running tasks on the user interaction tier, but rather user asynchronous mechanisms to execute these workflows. The UI, in this case, would just be responsible for keeping the user informed about the background execution status. While in the past, background tasks were handled through classic .NET threading model, nowadays, the TAP model provides a rich set of functionality, which releases the developers from the burden of creating, managing, and synchronizing the threads and thread pools. In this chapter, we have seen that there are various patterns that would allow for the creation of background tasks that would yield back to the UI thread so that the asynchronous process results can be propagated to the UI. We also discussed different strategies for synchronous mechanisms, together with Tasks, thus...