Question

Due to work restrictions, I need to continue using Visual Studio 2010 for the immediate future. At the same time, I have been learning about Async in my personal coding. Is the latest Async CTP fully consistent with the Async language features of C# 5.0? And is installing the Async CTP the correct way to use Async with VS2010?

Answer 1

The Async CTP is the only way to use async in Visual Studio 2010. However, it is not the async that made it into .NET 4.5 / Visual Studio 2012, several bugs in the CTP have been fixed in the final release. You will not get these bug fixes in Visual Studio 2010, according to the CTP’s readme:

NOTE ON “AS IS” LICENSE

While the Async CTP license does not prevent you using it at your own risk in production environments, we advise you not to. The goal of this CTP is solely to gather feedback on our intended async design. We did not design or build it to be used in production environments, and did not test it as thoroughly as is needed for use in production environments, and we believe it has too many flaws to be fit for use in production environments. We gratefully appreciate feedback on the Async CTP, but we do not plan to make any fixes to the Async CTP itself: the fixes we make will only appear in the eventual supported released product.

If you absolutely need VS 2010, what I would try is to install the Async CTP first, and then install .NET 4.5 (both runtime and SDK). Develop in Visual Studio, but build using the standalone compiler.