How and when to use ‘async’ and ‘await’

Question

From my understanding one of the main things that async and await do is to make code easy to write and read - but is using them equal to spawning background threads to perfo

Answer 1

I think you've picked a bad example with System.Threading.Thread.Sleep

Point of an async Task is to let it execute in background without locking the main thread, such as doing a DownloadFileAsync

System.Threading.Thread.Sleep isn't something that is "being done", it just sleeps, and therefore your next line is reached after 5 seconds ...

Read this article, I think it is a great explanation of async and await concept: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/hh191443.aspx