An overview of async and await

The async and await keywords were introduced on .NET 4.0.

In the past asynchronous operations were achieved by invoking methods and handling callbacks. Or by starting new threads and having to handle them. That way you have to focus on handling the asynchronous operations and it also caused your code to be split all over the place due the callbacks and complex error handling.

The async and await makes it possible so that you can create your code as you would when performing synchronous operations.

I am going to build a screen with a progress bar and some buttons, like this:

The XAML code for it is:

On this screen I have a couple of run buttons and a “Do something else” button.

When I click the Run button I am going to fill the progress bar from 0 to 100 without any asynchronous operations:

If I try to click “Do something else” button while the run command is executing nothing visual is going to happen because the UI will be frozen, but it will still queue your actions.

We can change this code to perform asynchronous by tagging the method with async. When we say a method is async we have to await some action. In this case I will await a task to run:

The await keyword is only available inside an async method. It means that it is going to wait for the operation to end before continuing, but only inside the async method. It means it will not lock our UI thread, it locks another thread.

If I run my application now that my method is in an asynchronous format I can “Do something else” at the same time my process is running:

An async method accepts 3 types of return values: void, Task or Task<T>.

When you return void you are saying that the operation will happen asynchronous and will not return anything at all.

When you return Task you are saying that the operation is returning.

When you return Task<T> you are saying that the operation is returning and it returns a value of type T.

This way you can have your asynchronous operations isolated in methods and it looks almost like you are just building normal code. You code stays very clean and organized.

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