Is it a best practice to call methods asynchronously by using delegates?

This msdn article is entitled "How to call a Visual C# method asynchronously".

The article says "Asynchronous calls are made by using delegates" to which I reply in my head "not necessarily, that's only one way to do it".

The matter-of-fact tone of the articles statement makes me wonder - Is it a best practice, or does MS consider it a best practice开发者_StackOverflow中文版, to use delegates when making asynchronous calls?

Up to the current .NET version, asynchronous methods have typically been handled in separate background threads from the one you trigger them from, so it's been mostly essential to do it using a delegate that you can invoke in another thread.

However, with the recent C# Async CTP (which will probably be in C# 5.0 or another future version), the story is changed a little - it's not essential to use delegates, you can write code in a traditional imperative style, and the compiler will do most of the work for you. This might involve delegates, but not necessarily - the compiler does some clever tricks and writes a finite state machine which can be used to execute code asynchronously.

Yes, delegates are the way to call methods asynchronously. It is not best practice, that is how it is done. In .NET, you must use a delegate.

Somebody can tell me im wrong please but i've been under the impression at compile time a delegate is as good as a method, the purpose of a delegate being a signature definition. I can think of no other way of executing async code without a method even if its anonymous which becomes a method at compile time..