Question

I have always pondered about this.

Let’s say we have a simple asynchronous web request using the HttpWebRequest class

class webtest1
{
    HttpWebRequest webRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("www.google.com");

    public webtest1()
    {
        this.StartWebRequest();
    }

    void StartWebRequest()
    {
        webRequest.BeginGetResponse(new AsyncCallback(FinishWebRequest), null);
    }

    void FinishWebRequest(IAsyncResult result)
    {
        webRequest.EndGetResponse(result);
    }
}

The same can be achieved easily with a synchronous operation:

class webtest1
{
    HttpWebRequest webRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("www.google.com");

    public webtest1()
    {
        webRequest.GetResponse();
    }
}

So why would I want to use the more convoluted async operation when a much simpler sync operation would suffice? To save system resources?

Answer 1

A synchronous operation will prevent you from doing anything else while waiting for the request to complete or time out. Using an asynchronous operation would let you animate something for the user to show the program is busy, or even let them carry on working with other areas of functionality.