Those of you who are familiar with the Asynchronous Programming Model ( APM ) know that you need to match every BeginXXX with an EndXXX . In this post I’ll try my best to convince you that if a class implements IDisposable correctly you can forgo calling EndXXX if Dispose was already invoked. I’ve tried doing that before on Stack Overflow without much success and was faced with a lot of pushback.

Asynchronous Programming Model

First, a short explanation on what APM even is. APM is a pattern for writing callback-based asynchronous code. Almost all asynchronous code before .NET 4.5 and async/await was based on APM . It’s a pattern where for each asynchronous operation there’s a BeginXXX method and an EndXXX method (e.g. BeginSend and EndSend ). BeginXXX accepts the operation’s parameters and a callback to be invoked when the operation completes and returns an IAsyncResult representing the asynchronous operation. EndXXX (which is usually called inside the callback) accepts the same IAsyncResult returned from BeginXXX and returns the operation’s result (if the operation hadn’t completed yet the call will block until it does). Here’s how it looks in code (I’ll be using UdpClient for examples but it’s the same for TcpClient , Socket , etc.):

byte [] data = // ... UdpClient udpClient = // ... udpClient . BeginSend ( data , data . Length , asyncResult => { try { udpClient . EndSend ( asyncResult ); // Observe exceptions Console . WriteLine ( "Sent successfully" ); } catch ( SocketException exception ) { // Handle... } }, null );

It’s important to call EndXXX even when the operation doesn’t return a result to observe exceptions.

Nowadays asynchronous code is usually written with async/await and .NET offers task-returning methods next to the APM method for most BCL types. However, under the hood most of these methods are still APM methods covered up with a task-returning overload using Task.Factory.FromAsync . You can see, for example, in UdpClient.ReceiveAsync the calls to BeginReceive and EndReceive :

public Task < UdpReceiveResult > ReceiveAsync () { return Task < UdpReceiveResult >. Factory . FromAsync ( ( callback , state ) => BeginReceive ( callback , state ), ( ar ) => { IPEndPoint remoteEP = null ; Byte [] buffer = EndReceive ( ar , ref remoteEP ); return new UdpReceiveResult ( buffer , remoteEP ); }, null ); }

Cancellation

These async methods (which are actually APM methods) usually don’t accept a CancellationToken because it was only added in .NET 4.0 (if they do it may only have an effect before the operation started) and rarely accept a timeout so they are non-cancellable. What you usually do if a task gets “stuck” is just pretend as if they were cancellable by attaching a task to it that you can cancel and abandoning the original task on cancellation, for example:

static Task < UdpReceiveResult > ReceiveAsync ( this UdpClient udpClient , CancellationToken cancellationToken ) { // Start the original operation Task < UdpReceiveResult > receiveTask = udpClient . ReceiveAsync (); // Add support for cancellation return receiveTask . WithCancellation ( cancellationToken ); } static async Task < T > WithCancellation < T >( this Task < T > task , CancellationToken cancellationToken ) { // Create a self-cancelling TaskCompletionSource var tcs = new TaskCompletionSourceWithCancellation < T >( cancellationToken ); // Wait for completion or cancellation Task < T > completedTask = await Task . WhenAny ( task , tcs . Task ); return await completedTask ; }

WithCancellation uses TaskCompletionSourceWithCancellation which is a useful utility for having a self cancelling TaskCompletionSource . It accepts a CancellationToken and adds a registration to complete the TaskCompletionSource when the token is cancelled.

class TaskCompletionSourceWithCancellation < TResult > : TaskCompletionSource < TResult > { public TaskCompletionSourceWithCancellation ( CancellationToken cancellationToken ) { CancellationTokenRegistration registration = cancellationToken . Register (() => TrySetResult ( default ( TResult ))); // Remove the registration after the task completes Task . ContinueWith ( _ => registration . Dispose ()); } }

That’s all well and good, but that original task (the one returned from ReceiveAsync in this case) is still out there holding on to some state and waiting to be completed. The WithCancellation extension only allows you as the consumer to move forward on cancellation but it can’t actually abort the original task. The only way to get rid of it is to dispose of the instance itself (if it’s IDisposable ). Calling Dispose on the instance will go over all the pending operations and complete them by invoking all the callbacks. Since these callbacks almost always call EndXXX (or EndReceive in this case) and the instance was already disposed these tasks will end up with an ObjectDisposedException (which will eventually lead to an UnobservedTaskException ).

So, for each of these “stuck” tasks you can either let it linger forever (AKA memory leak) or clean it up with Dispose that results in an exception. Avoiding a memory leak is preferable but too much of these exceptions (>50 per second) could easily hurt your performance.

IDisposable Trumps APM

Now, since calling Dispose on an IDisposable instance cleans all resources up and invoking EndXXX on that instance after Dispose has no effect as it throws an ObjectDisposedException immediately there’s no reason to call EndXXX after cancellation to begin with, especially if these exceptions become a performance issue. You can’t control the implementation of the task-returning wrapper, but you can create one of your own that does accept a CancellationToken but doesn’t call EndXXX if the token is cancelled. That way you can abandon the non-cancellable “stuck” operation, dispose of the instance to clear resources and avoid the unnecessary ObjectDisposedException :

static Task < UdpReceiveResult > UnsafeReceiveAsync ( this UdpClient udpClient , CancellationToken cancellationToken ) { return UnsafeFromAsync ( udpClient . BeginReceive , asyncResult => { IPEndPoint remoteEP = null ; byte [] buffer = udpClient . EndReceive ( asyncResult , ref remoteEP ); return new UdpReceiveResult ( buffer , remoteEP ); }, cancellationToken ); }

This also requires having your own version of Task.Factory.FromAsync because this method is the one that actually invokes EndXXX

static Task < TResult > UnsafeFromAsync < TResult >( Func < AsyncCallback , object , IAsyncResult > beginMethod , Func < IAsyncResult , TResult > endMethod , CancellationToken cancellationToken ) { // Create a self-cancelling TaskCompletionSource var taskCompletionSource = new TaskCompletionSourceWithCancellation < TResult >( cancellationToken ); beginMethod ( asyncResult => { try { // Don't call endMethod if cancellation was requested if (! cancellationToken . IsCancellationRequested ) { taskCompletionSource . TrySetResult ( endMethod ( asyncResult )); } } catch ( OperationCanceledException operationCanceledException ) { taskCompletionSource . TrySetCanceled ( operationCanceledException . CancellationToken ); } catch ( Exception exception ) { taskCompletionSource . TrySetException ( exception ); } }, null ); return taskCompletionSource . Task ; }

Keep in mind that this pattern is only appropriate in extreme cases where the exception rate has been shown to be too high (hence the Unsafe prefix).

In Summary