Question

I’m trying to implement fire and forget functionality, using the Task Parallel Library. With an inline call to Task.Factory.StartNew, everything works as expected. However, I want to move the Task.Factory.StartNew call into a separate class so that I can add logging, error handling, etc, and potentially upgrade the code in the future as better threading classes, etc are added to the .NET Framework, without duplicating code.

Below is a unit test that I would expect to pass, but that does not. I would appreciate help trying to figure out how to make this work.

[TestFixture]
public class ThreadingServiceFixture
{
    public static bool methodFired = false;

    [Test]
    public void CanFireAndForgetWithThreadingService()
    {
        try
        {
            var service = new ThreadingService();

            service.FireAndForget(() => methodFired = true);

            var endTime = DateTime.Now.AddSeconds(1);

            while(DateTime.Now < endTime)
            {
                //wait
            }

            Assert.IsTrue(methodFired == true);
        }
        finally
        {
            methodFired = false;
        }       
    }

}

public class ThreadingService
{
    public Task FireAndForget(Action action)
    {
        return Task.Factory.StartNew(() => action);
    }
}

Answer 1

You’re not executing the action, you’re just returning it.

Try:

return Task.Factory.StartNew(() => action());