Asynchronous Task.WhenAll with timeout

You could combine the resulting Task with a Task.Delay() using Task.WhenAny():

await Task.WhenAny(Task.WhenAll(tasks), Task.Delay(timeout));

If you want to harvest completed tasks in case of a timeout:

var completedResults =
  tasks
  .Where(t => t.Status == TaskStatus.RanToCompletion)
  .Select(t => t.Result)
  .ToList();

I think a clearer, more robust option that also does exception handling right would be to use Task.WhenAny on each task together with a timeout task, go through all the completed tasks and filter out the timeout ones, and use await Task.WhenAll() instead of Task.Result to gather all the results.

Here's a complete working solution:

static async Task<TResult[]> WhenAll<TResult>(IEnumerable<Task<TResult>> tasks, TimeSpan timeout)
{
    var timeoutTask = Task.Delay(timeout).ContinueWith(_ => default(TResult));
    var completedTasks = 
        (await Task.WhenAll(tasks.Select(task => Task.WhenAny(task, timeoutTask)))).
        Where(task => task != timeoutTask);
    return await Task.WhenAll(completedTasks);
}

Check out the "Early Bailout" and "Task.Delay" sections from Microsoft's Consuming the Task-based Asynchronous Pattern.

Early bailout. An operation represented by t1 can be grouped in a WhenAny with another task t2, and we can wait on the WhenAny task. t2 could represent a timeout, or cancellation, or some other signal that will cause the WhenAny task to complete prior to t1 completing.

What you describe seems like a very common demand however I could not find anywhere an example of this. And I searched a lot... I finally created the following:

TimeSpan timeout = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5.0);

Task<Task>[] tasksOfTasks =
{
    Task.WhenAny(SomeTaskAsync("a"), Task.Delay(timeout)),
    Task.WhenAny(SomeTaskAsync("b"), Task.Delay(timeout)),
    Task.WhenAny(SomeTaskAsync("c"), Task.Delay(timeout))
};

Task[] completedTasks = await Task.WhenAll(tasksOfTasks);

List<MyResult> = completedTasks.OfType<Task<MyResult>>().Select(task => task.Result).ToList();

I assume here a method SomeTaskAsync that returns Task<MyResult>.

From the members of completedTasks, only tasks of type MyResult are our own tasks that managed to beat the clock. Task.Delay returns a different type. This requires some compromise on typing, but still works beautifully and quite simple.

(The array can of course be built dynamically using a query + ToArray).

• Note that this implementation does not require SomeTaskAsync to receive a cancellation token.

In addition to timeout, I also check the cancellation which is useful if you are building a web app.

public static async Task WhenAll(
    IEnumerable<Task> tasks, 
    int millisecondsTimeOut,
    CancellationToken cancellationToken)
{
    using(Task timeoutTask = Task.Delay(millisecondsTimeOut))
    using(Task cancellationMonitorTask = Task.Delay(-1, cancellationToken))
    {
        Task completedTask = await Task.WhenAny(
            Task.WhenAll(tasks), 
            timeoutTask, 
            cancellationMonitorTask
        );

        if (completedTask == timeoutTask)
        {
            throw new TimeoutException();
        }
        if (completedTask == cancellationMonitorTask)
        {
            throw new OperationCanceledException();
        }
        await completedTask;
    }
}