Programming C# 12

Chapter 11. Rx: Reactive Extensions

The Reactive Extensions for .NET (usually shortened to Rx) are designed for working with asynchronous and event-based information sources. Rx provides services that help you orchestrate and synchronize the way your code reacts to data from these kinds of sources. We already saw how to define and subscribe to events in Chapter 9, but Rx offers much more than these basic features. It provides an abstraction that has a steeper learning curve than events, but it comes with a powerful set of operators that makes it far easier to combine and manage multiple streams of events than is possible with the free-for-all that delegates and .NET events provide. Microsoft has also made an associated set of libraries called Reaqtor available that builds on the foundation of Rx to provide a framework for reliable, stateful, distributed, scalable, high-performance event processing in services. (The q in Reaqtor is a nod to the IQuerable<T> interface described in the preceding chapter.)

Rx’s fundamental abstraction, IObservable<T>, represents a sequence of items, and its operators are defined as extension methods for this interface. This might sound a lot like LINQ to Objects, and there are similarities—not only does IObservable<T> have a lot in common with IEnumerable<T>, but Rx also supports almost all of the standard LINQ operators. If you are familiar with LINQ to Objects, you will also feel at home with Rx. The difference is that in Rx, sequences are less ...