The present invention extends to methods, systems, and computer program products for coordinating application state and communication medium state. Embodiments of the invention provide mechanisms by which a dispatcher can enable application code to coordinate changes in application state with the consumption of messages from a communication medium. The coordination can be automatic where the dispatcher performs the coordination, or manual, where the coordination is performed more expressly by application code. Embodiments also include mechanisms by which applications targeting an execution (e.g., continuation based) runtime may compose alternative state transitions in the application with a peek lock protocol.