What is the purpose of “return await” in C#?

Question

Is there any scenario where writing method like this:

public async Task DoSomethingAsync()
{
    // Some synchronous code          


        

Answer 1

This also confuses me and I feel that the previous answers overlooked your actual question:

Why use return await construct when you can directly return Task from the inner DoAnotherThingAsync() invocation?

Well sometimes you actually want a Task, but most time you actually want an instance of SomeType, that is, the result from the task.

From your code:

async Task DoSomethingAsync()
{
    using (var foo = new Foo())
    {
        return await foo.DoAnotherThingAsync();
    }
}

A person unfamiliar with the syntax (me, for example) might think that this method should return a Task, but since it is marked with async, it means that its actual return type is SomeResult. If you just use return foo.DoAnotherThingAsync(), you'd be returning a Task, which wouldn't compile. The correct way is to return the result of the task, so the return await.