Hi, I extended the TaskClient class. It was straight forward enough. Anyone using the class would just see a few extra task list methods, the only real different to them is the use of a QueryGenericResponseHandler instead of a BlockingTaskResponseHandler.
I am agreement with you that this method should not be deprecated if it's functionality hasn't been replaced in some way. Incidentally, when I was writing and testing the queries I did receive an exception informing me that only Select statements were supported so perhaps this protection is now built in. It was actually caused by some line breaks in the query string as apposed to me trying to do any writing to the task tables!