It is available during debugging only and helpful to examine the tasks which are running asynchronous operations concurrently within a thread. We can have multiple tasks running on the same thread. We can open Tasks Window in VS 2015 from Debug -> Windows -> Tasks or using shortcut Ctrl+Shift+D, K.
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We can use Tasks Window in the following
- Managed code- It is used to work with System.Threading.Tasks.Task objects or with the await and async keywords.
- Native code- It is used to work with the task groups, parallel algorithms, asynchronous agents and lightweight tasks.
- JavaScript- To work with promise, followed by the code.
Let’s create a console application to understand it better with the code give below.
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Here, we created two tasks and executed the same method to display the task ID and sleep the current task for 1 second. Let’s keep a breakpoint and debug it to examine those tasks in Tasks Window.
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Let’s look at the columns, which are helpful in Tasks Window given below.
- Flag column is used to flag\unflag a task on which we need to focus on.
- Icon column indicates currently executing task with a Yellow indicator, White arrow for breaking task and pause icon for the task frozen by the user.
- The ID column contains a system generated identification number of the task.
- Status column displays the current state of the task. It will show one of the states given below.
- Scheduled,
- Active
- Deadlocked,
- Waiting or
- Completed
A scheduled task that has not yet been run will not have a call stack, assigned thread or the related information.
- Location column helps to look at the currently executing code.
We can add\remove the columns, as shown below.
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We can group and sort the tasks as well.
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We can freeze a thread on which the task is running, so that it will not execute when you step through the code after the current breakpoint
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The “Freeze All Threads But This One” command freezes all the threads except the one that is selected in the task list.
Similarly, we can resume\un-freeze a thread, which runs the task by clicking on Thaw Assigned Thread.
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I am ending things here. I hope this is informative.