Task Scheduling

Abstract

You saw in Chapter 6 how, when creating a continuation, you can pass a scheduler on which to execute the task. The example in the chapter used the out-of-the-box SynchronizationContextTaskScheduler to push task execution on to the UI thread. It turns out, however, that there is nothing special about the SynchronizationContextTaskScheduler; the task scheduler is a pluggable component. .NET 4.5 introduced another specialized scheduler, but beyond that you can write task schedulers yourself. This chapter looks at the new scheduler introduced in .NET 4.5 and how to write a custom task scheduler. Writing custom task schedulers can be fairly straightforward, but there are some of the issues that you need to be aware of.