Question - Are the Microsoft.Bcl libraries now required?

[jonreis]

Hi Stephen, first, thank you for your library, I love it.

I have a question regarding the 4.0.1 release. I just pulled it and noticed that it pulled in the Microsoft.Bcl libraries and build targets. I was under the assumption those were only required older versions of the .NET platform? I do not see any dependencies between your libraries and Microsoft.Bcl. My project is set to build against the .NET 4.6.2 framework.

Questions:

1. Do I need Microsoft.Bcl.Build.targets?
2. Are the AsyncEx libraries in anyway dependent on the Microsoft.Bcl and Microsoft.Bcl.Async libraries when running under .NET 4.6.2?

Thank you in advance,
Jonathan

[StephenCleary]

Yes, unfortunately, due to the way the PCLs form the core of this project, they are required. See #13.

v5 will target netstandard and not require Microsoft.Bcl any more.

[jonreis]

Thank you for the info Stephen. I will probably wait until v5 before upgrading.

[kyberias]

This is somewhat of a show-stopper. There doesn't seem to be a good release of AsyncEx for classic .NET that wouldn't bring extra baggage.

[StephenCleary]

@kyberias Unfortunately, the problem as specified in #13 is outside my control. Classic .NET support requires Microsoft.Bcl for a PCL-based approach; there's simply no getting around that. The netstandard-based v5 does not have that dependency.

You can use the prerelease v5 today; I want to fix #107 before calling it fully production-ready, but a lot of people are already using it in production (#107 only shows up if you mix blocking and asynchronous calls and exhaust your thread pool).

[kyberias]

I tried the pre-release v5 but it seems to bring a lot of additional (.NET Standard?) references to my assembly. I'm not sure I want that.

[bqstony]

I Have also a problem with the Microsoft.Bcl.Build package. We use Package reference insteed of package.config in full framework 4.7.1 solution. My workaround is actually to ignore the target as follow:

    <PackageReference Include="Microsoft.Bcl.Build">
      <Version>1.0.21</Version>
      <ExcludeAssets>build</ExcludeAssets>
    </PackageReference>
    <PackageReference Include="Nito.AsyncEx">
      <Version>4.0.1</Version>
    </PackageReference>

I Hope this will not has a impact! can you confirm that @StephenCleary

[StephenCleary]

@bqstony That's an interesting approach! I'm not sure what all impact that would have. I expect it would work fine with modern tooling, but I'm not familiar enough with the .targets files to know for sure.

[bqstony]

After some days i see actual no bad behavior for my solution. But i will look forward to V5...

[rollsch]

Is there any update to this? Are the libraries still required?

[StephenCleary]

@rolandh v5 targets netstandard and does not require Microsoft.Bcl.Async anymore.