Asynchronous ASP.NET MVC

Since ASP.NET MVC 2, Microsoft's thrown the AsyncController class into the framework, enabling asynchronous ASP.NET MVC applications without forcing developers to hand-craft their own weird and wonderful solutions. The AsyncController exposes an AsyncManager property, which allows you to increment/decrement the number of outstanding operations, and collect arguments to pass through to the XxxCompleted method when all operations are complete. To use the said controller, do this:

Derive your controller from System.Web.Mvc.AsyncController, which is treated differently by ASP.NET, and allows you access to the AsyncManager.

For each logical asynchronous method you need, provide a pair of methods that follow a set naming convention, where the method name prefix matches the action name:
1) Begin method name suffix is Async and return type is void
2) End method name suffix is Completed, parameters match those set up in the AsyncManager, and return type is an ActionResult.

For example:

public void IndexAsync()
{
    ViewData["Message"] = "Welcome to Asynchronous ASP.NET MVC!";
    AsyncManager.OutstandingOperations.Increment();
    WebService.WebService webService = new MvcApplication1.WebService.WebService();
    webService.HelloWorldCompleted += (sender, e) =>
    {
        AsyncManager.Parameters["greeting"] = e.Result;
        AsyncManager.OutstandingOperations.Decrement();
    };
    webService.HelloWorldAsync();
}

public ActionResult IndexCompleted(string greeting)
{
    ViewData["AsyncMessage"] = greeting;
    return View();
}

In case the execution flow doesn't appear obvious: on receipt of a request for the Index action, ASP.NET uses reflection to find the method pair with the prefix Index and invokes the first half of the method pair (IndexAsync) on its thread pool. The method implementation declares one asynchronous operation to the AsyncManager. We use the Event-based Asynchronous Pattern to call a demo ASMX web service asynchronously from this client - the Completed event handler sets a parameter value and decrements the number of outstanding operations. ASP.NET waits for the number of outstanding operations to reach zero, then looks for an IndexCompleted method with a string parameter named "greeting" (because this is what we called the parameter when we assigned the result on the AsyncManager, during the web service completed event handler). It invokes it (the second half of the method pair) and the rest - they say - is history.