Languages and frameworks evolve. We as developers have to learn new things constantly and unlearn already-learned knowledge. Speaking for myself, unlearning is the most difficult part of continuous learning. When I first came into contact with multi-threaded applications in .NET, I stumbled over the ThreadStatic attribute. I made a mental note that this attribute is particularly helpful when you have static fields that should not be shared between threads. At the time that the .NET Framework 4.0 was released, I discovered the ThreadLocal class and how it does a better job assigning default values to thread-specific data. So I unlearned the
ThreadStaticAttribute, favoring insteadThreadLocal<T>.Fast forward to some time later, when I started digging into
async/await. I fell victim to a belief that thread-specific data still worked. So I was wrong, again, and had to unlearn, again! If only I had known about AsyncLocal earlier.Let’s learn and unlearn together!
If you want to learn more about async/await and why you shouldn’t use ThreadStatic or ThreadLocal with async/await, I suggest you read the full blog post originally posted on the particular blog.
