Understanding asynchrony and the Windows Runtime

When developing the Windows Runtime for Windows 8/8.1, Microsoft followed a design guideline where any synchronous method that might take longer than 50 ms to complete was to be removed and replaced with an asynchronous version. The goal behind this design decision is to dramatically improve the chances of developers building applications that work smoothly without blocking threads on framework calls.

In this recipe, you're going to revisit the RSS feed reader concept, just as you did in the Making your code asynchronous recipe, though this time you're going to be creating a Windows Store application.

There are a few differences between a Windows Store application and a console application, which include differences in the classes available. For example, the WebClient class doesn't exist in WinRT, so you'll be using the HttpClient class instead.

For variety, you will be writing this code using Visual Basic.

Getting ready

Ensure you are running...