BackgroundWorker was introduced early in .NET Framework as an easy way to do asynchronous tasks in Windows Forms applications. Though it is WinForms centric and not considered part of the async patterns, its beauty lies in the simplicity and just enough encapsulation. You don’t need to know much about the async patterns to use this tiny little class in your code base, and things often just work.

Different async patterns were developed by Microsoft to assist developers.

However, after .NET Framework 4.x came with Task based classes (Task Parallel Library), and especially 4.5 where async/await was introduced, you should move away from BackgroundWorker whenever possible.

Well, the only challenge is, how we can convert the code base from BackgroundWorker to async/await, which I will show you in this post.

The Sample Project in Initial State

The project is hosted on GitHub, and is Windows Forms based.

To make full use of BackgroundWorker’s capability, both progress reporting and cancellation are utilized. As you can see it is rather simple, and easy to understand.

This pattern does have its problems, like

• You need to keep in mind that DoWork event handler runs in a separate thread, not the UI thread (aka main thread), though that’s not quite obvious from the code.

ProgressChanged and RunWorkerCompleted event handlers, however, are executed in the UI thread. That’s why there the text of label can be updated directly.

• Cancellation required several pieces to be set, and if you miss one piece the result won’t meet your expectation.
• Here Thread.Sleep is used to mimic a slow sync function call (usually yours should be calls like SqlCommand.ExecuteScalar).

  When you need to call an async function like SqlCommand.ExecuteScalarAsync, it is not obvious how to write the correct code inside DoWork. This is a bigger issue with new .NET APIs, as they are full of async functions (Signal for example).

Removing BackgroundWorker

Well, now it’s time to kill the bird. And you can easily see the changes here in the commit.

Obvious parts are,

• CancellationTokenSource and CancellationToken are needed now to implement cancellation.
• There is no need to have separate methods and everything can come together in a single method.
• Mostly importantly the heavy task must be in a Task object now, and here I use Task.Delay as an example (but in your project you might use things like SqlCommand.ExecuteScalarAsync).

You must keep in mind there are many important tips on proper usage of async/await, including but not limited to

• async void is only used for the button click event handler as Microsoft documented.
• While the heavy task is executed in the background (and awaited), changing the text of label is in UI thread, as after the await line the execution context is restored.

  Capturing/restoring such context is expensive, so you should suppress that with ConfigureAwait(false). Microsoft guys wrote a must-read post here.

Conclusion

Task and async/await have been very important addition to .NET ecosystem, so use them whenever possible and that’s going to make your life a lot easier.