Best way in .NET to manage queue of tasks on a separate (single) thread

To create an asynchronous single degree of parallelism queue of work you can simply create a SemaphoreSlim, initialized to one, and then have the enqueing method await on the acquisition of that semaphore before starting the requested work.

public class TaskQueue
{
    private SemaphoreSlim semaphore;
    public TaskQueue()
    {
        semaphore = new SemaphoreSlim(1);
    }

    public async Task<T> Enqueue<T>(Func<Task<T>> taskGenerator)
    {
        await semaphore.WaitAsync();
        try
        {
            return await taskGenerator();
        }
        finally
        {
            semaphore.Release();
        }
    }
    public async Task Enqueue(Func<Task> taskGenerator)
    {
        await semaphore.WaitAsync();
        try
        {
            await taskGenerator();
        }
        finally
        {
            semaphore.Release();
        }
    }
}

Of course, to have a fixed degree of parallelism other than one simply initialize the semaphore to some other number.

Your best option as I see it is using TPL Dataflow's ActionBlock:

var actionBlock = new ActionBlock<string>(address =>
{
    if (!IsDuplicate(address))
    {
        LocateAddress(address);
    }
});

actionBlock.Post(context.Request.UserHostAddress);

TPL Dataflow is robust, thread-safe, async-ready and very configurable actor-based framework (available as a nuget)

Here's a simple example for a more complicated case. Let's assume you want to:

• Enable concurrency (limited to the available cores).
• Limit the queue size (so you won't run out of memory).
• Have both LocateAddress and the queue insertion be async.
• Cancel everything after an hour.

var actionBlock = new ActionBlock<string>(async address =>
{
    if (!IsDuplicate(address))
    {
        await LocateAddressAsync(address);
    }
}, new ExecutionDataflowBlockOptions
{
    BoundedCapacity = 10000,
    MaxDegreeOfParallelism = Environment.ProcessorCount,
    CancellationToken = new CancellationTokenSource(TimeSpan.FromHours(1)).Token
});

await actionBlock.SendAsync(context.Request.UserHostAddress);