Is it advantageous to use ConfigureAwait(false) in a library that directly returns a Task from a call to another library?

Question

Follow-up to this question. I have a library with many async methods that thinly wrap HttpClient. Effectively they just do some setup and directly return the Task r

Answer 1

No, ConfigureAwait as its name suggests, configures the await. If you don't need to await then you don't need to configure it.

There's no added value in adding async-await just to use ConfigureAwait as it only affects your method and not the calling method. If the caller needs to use ConfigureAwait they will do so themselves.

Having an async method instead of a simple Task-returning method is a valid choice for many reasons (e.g. exception handling), and it will require using ConfigureAwait but ConfigureAwait is not a good reason for doing that by itself.

Answer 2

No, don't do this.

Since you're not using await, you're not supposed to configure for it in advance. It's the responsibility of the caller of your library to do the ConfigureAwait call. And the caller may well want to call ConfigureAwait(true) instead of ConfigureAwait(false) - you don't know that.

Calling ConfigureAwait(false) in library code is best practice only when you await on it in the library.

In most cases, code like this:

async Task<Something> DoSomethingAsync()
{
    return await DoSomethingElseAsync().ConfigureAwait(false);
}

Is equivalent to:

Task<Something> DoSomethingAsync()
{
    return DoSomethingElseAsync();
}

if DoSomethingElseAsync respects the Task contract (for instance, if it returns a failed Task instead of throwing exceptions).

Creating an additional state machine for that is just adding one layer of wrapping code with no added value - it is better to simply return the Task directly.

In other words: you get no efficiency benefit whatsoever from doing this, quite the contrary.