Asynchronously wait for Task to complete with timeout

Question

I want to wait for a Task to complete with some special rules: If it hasn\'t completed after X milliseconds, I want to display a message to the user. And

Answer 1

Here's a extension method version that incorporates cancellation of the timeout when the original task completes as suggested by Andrew Arnott in a comment to his answer.

public static async Task TimeoutAfter(this Task task, TimeSpan timeout) {

    using (var timeoutCancellationTokenSource = new CancellationTokenSource()) {

        var completedTask = await Task.WhenAny(task, Task.Delay(timeout, timeoutCancellationTokenSource.Token));
        if (completedTask == task) {
            timeoutCancellationTokenSource.Cancel();
            return await task;  // Very important in order to propagate exceptions
        } else {
            throw new TimeoutException("The operation has timed out.");
        }
    }
}