c# - ContinueWith loses the SynchronizationContext

Question

In the snippet below, the SynchronizationContext is lost, and because of that also the CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture. Log() comes from this answer.

public async Task<ActionResult> Index()
{
    Log("before GetAsync");
    await new HttpClient().GetAsync("http://www.example.com/")
        .ContinueWith(request =>
        {
            Log("ContinueWith");
            request.Result.EnsureSuccessStatusCode();
        }, TaskContinuationOptions.AttachedToParent);

    return View();
}

static void Log(string message)
{
    var ctx = System.Threading.SynchronizationContext.Current;
    System.Diagnostics.Debug.Print("{0}; thread: {1}, context: {2}, culture: {3}, uiculture: {4}",
        message,
        System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.ManagedThreadId,
        ctx != null ? ctx.GetType().Name : String.Empty,
        System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.Name,
        System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture.Name);
}

This is the output:

before GetAsync; thread: 56, context: AspNetSynchronizationContext, culture: nl, uiculture: nl
ContinueWith; thread: 46, context: , culture: nl-BE, uiculture: en-US

Before the GetAsync, the culture and UI culture have the values I set in Application_BeginRequest. Inside the ContinueWith, the context is missing, the culture is set to what's provided by the browser, and UI culture is set to some default.

From what I understand, everything with AspNetSynchronizationContext should be happening automatically. What's wrong with my code?

Answer 1

In order to force scheduling of the continuation on the request context thread, you need to specify the TaskScheduler that should be used when scheduling the continuation.

public async Task<ActionResult> Index()
{
    Log("before GetAsync");
    await new HttpClient().GetAsync("http://www.example.com/")
        .ContinueWith(request =>
        {
            Log("ContinueWith");
            request.Result.EnsureSuccessStatusCode();
        }, 
        TaskContinuationOptions.AttachedToParent,
        CancellationToken.None,
        TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext());

    return View();
}

Howver, you are using await which automatically marshals continuations on to the current SynchronizationContext. You should be able to do this:

public async Task<ActionResult> Index()
    {
        Log("before GetAsync");
        HttpResponseMessage request = await new HttpClient().GetAsync("http://www.example.com/");

        //everything below here is you 'continuation' on the request context
        Log("ContinueWith");
        request.EnsureSuccessStatusCode();

        return View();
    }