Starting async method as Thread or as Task

Question

I\'m new to C#s await/async and currently playing around a bit.

In my scenario I have a simple client-object which has a WebRequest

Answer 1

How should the method be started?

I vote for "none of the above". :)

"Fire and forget" is a difficult scenario to handle correctly. In particular, error handling is always problematic. In this case, async void may surprise you.

I prefer to explicitly save the tasks if I'm not awaiting them immediately:

private async Task SendAliveMessageAsync();

public Task KeepaliveTask { get; private set; }

public Client()
{
  ...
  KeepaliveTask = SendAliveMessageAsync();
}

This at least allows the consumers of Client to detect and recover from exceptions thrown by the SendAliveMessageAsync method.

On a side note, this pattern is almost equivalent to my "asynchronous initialization" pattern.