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

Async / Await

Actually Async / Await are a pair of keywords which are just syntactic sugar for creating a callback of an asynchronous task.

Take by example this operation:

    public static void DoSomeWork()
    {
        var task = Task.Run(() =>
        {
            // [RUNS ON WORKER THREAD]

            // IS NOT bubbling up due to the different threads
            throw new Exception();
            Thread.Sleep(2000);

            return "Hello";
        });

        // This is the callback
        task.ContinueWith((t) => {
            // -> Exception is swallowed silently
            Console.WriteLine("Completed");

            // [RUNS ON WORKER THREAD]
        });
    }

The code above has several disadvantages. Errors are not passed on and it's hard to read. But Async and Await come in to help us out:

    public async static void DoSomeWork()
    {
        var result = await Task.Run(() =>
        {
            // [RUNS ON WORKER THREAD]

            // IS bubbling up
            throw new Exception();
            Thread.Sleep(2000);

            return "Hello";
        });

        // every thing below is a callback 
        // (including the calling methods)

        Console.WriteLine("Completed");

    }

Await calls have to be in Async methods. This has some advantages:

• Returns the result of the Task
• creates automatically a callback
• checks for errors and lets them bubble up in callstack (only up to none-await calls in callstack)
• waits for the result
• frees up the main thread
• runs the callback on the main thread
• uses a worker thread from the threadpool for the task
• makes the code easy to read
• and a lot more

NOTE: Async and Await are used with asynchronous calls not to make these. You have to use Task Libary for this, like Task.Run() .

Here is a comparison between await and none await solutions

This is the none async solution:

    public static long DoTask()
    {
        stopWatch.Reset();
        stopWatch.Start();

        // [RUNS ON MAIN THREAD]
        var task = Task.Run(() => {
            Thread.Sleep(2000);
            // [RUNS ON WORKER THREAD]
        });
        // goes directly further
        // WITHOUT waiting until the task is finished

        // [RUNS ON MAIN THREAD]

        stopWatch.Stop();
        // 50 milliseconds
        return stopWatch.ElapsedMilliseconds;
    }

This is the async method:

    public async static Task DoAwaitTask()
    {
        stopWatch.Reset();
        stopWatch.Start();

        // [RUNS ON MAIN THREAD]

        await Task.Run(() => {
            Thread.Sleep(2000);
            // [RUNS ON WORKER THREAD]
        });
        // Waits until task is finished

        // [RUNS ON MAIN THREAD]

        stopWatch.Stop();
        // 2050 milliseconds
        return stopWatch.ElapsedMilliseconds;
    }

You can actually call an async method without the await keyword but this means that any Exception here are swallowed in release mode:

    public static Stopwatch stopWatch { get; } = new Stopwatch();

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("DoAwaitTask: " + DoAwaitTask().Result + " ms");
        // 2050 (2000 more because of the await)
        Console.WriteLine("DoTask: " + DoTask() + " ms");
        // 50
        Console.ReadKey();
    }

Async and Await are not meant for parallel computing. They are used to not block your main thread. When it's about asp.net or Windows applications, blocking your main thread due to a network call is a bad thing. If you do this, your app will get unresponsive or even crash.

Check out ms docs for more examples.