.NET Cancellation Tokens
Introduction Cancellation tokens in .NET were introduced as part of the .NET 4 Cancellation Framework . Essentially, it is a standard, cooperative, way to request for the cancellation of the execution of an operation. By cooperative it means that the code that uses it must abide to some rules, as opposed to the cancellation just stopping (killing) the execution. One example of cancellation is, on a web app, when the client closes the connection while the server is performing some long operation. In cases such as this, we may want to abort the operation, as we are not sending the results anywhere (or not, as we shall see). Because of this, ASP.NET Core allows us to add a parameter of type CancellationToken to our asynchronous actions, it is automatically associated with the client and is therefore signalled when the client connection is closed. A CancellationToken is, essentially, behind the scenes, a ManualResetEvent . Throughout this article I will either ...