Skip to main content

What is the behavior of an async method that returns void

In .NET 4.5 running async code was made easier than ever with async. I already talk a little about this new functionality, but I felt need to talk a little bit about some asycn methods that returns Task or (Task) and the async methods that returns void.
If we have an async method with the following definition:
public async Task<string> DoSomeActionAsync(…) { … }
In this case this method can be executed async and the method can be awaited. The user can wait until the action is executed. After the action is executed, the control is given back to code that waited the action to end. This action can start delegate asynchronous work.
In contrast with this definition, if we have the following definition:
public async void DoSomeActionAsync (…) { … }
This action cannot be awaited. When the user calls this method is a call of type fire and forget. The code that made the call will not be notified when the action was finished. Because of this, each call of this type start a separate independent flow.
Usually, an async method returns void when we want to define an event handler or to override void methods. Using this syntax it is very easy to call from event handler async methods.When you want to define a library that executes async calls or to define some helper methods you should always return Task or Task.
Also, when you work with async methods don’t forget to start them as soon as possible. I saw some async code, where the user defined some async methods and only at the end of an action he begins to execute these actions. If you have the possibility to start an async action sooner, than do it. In this you can reduce the execution time of your action. Because you can wait an async method multiple times, nothing will happen if you try to wait more than one time an action.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Windows Docker Containers can make WIN32 API calls, use COM and ASP.NET WebForms

After the last post , I received two interesting questions related to Docker and Windows. People were interested if we do Win32 API calls from a Docker container and if there is support for COM. WIN32 Support To test calls to WIN32 API, let’s try to populate SYSTEM_INFO class. [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)] public struct SYSTEM_INFO { public uint dwOemId; public uint dwPageSize; public uint lpMinimumApplicationAddress; public uint lpMaximumApplicationAddress; public uint dwActiveProcessorMask; public uint dwNumberOfProcessors; public uint dwProcessorType; public uint dwAllocationGranularity; public uint dwProcessorLevel; public uint dwProcessorRevision; } ... [DllImport("kernel32")] static extern void GetSystemInfo(ref SYSTEM_INFO pSI); ... SYSTEM_INFO pSI = new SYSTEM_INFO(

Azure AD and AWS Cognito side-by-side

In the last few weeks, I was involved in multiple opportunities on Microsoft Azure and Amazon, where we had to analyse AWS Cognito, Azure AD and other solutions that are available on the market. I decided to consolidate in one post all features and differences that I identified for both of them that we should need to take into account. Take into account that Azure AD is an identity and access management services well integrated with Microsoft stack. In comparison, AWS Cognito is just a user sign-up, sign-in and access control and nothing more. The focus is not on the main features, is more on small things that can make a difference when you want to decide where we want to store and manage our users.  This information might be useful in the future when we need to decide where we want to keep and manage our users.  Feature Azure AD (B2C, B2C) AWS Cognito Access token lifetime Default 1h – the value is configurable 1h – cannot be modified

ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded

Today blog post will be started with the following error when running DB tests on the CI machine: threw exception: System.InvalidOperationException: The Entity Framework provider type 'System.Data.Entity.SqlServer.SqlProviderServices, EntityFramework.SqlServer' registered in the application config file for the ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded. Make sure that the assembly-qualified name is used and that the assembly is available to the running application. See http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=260882 for more information. at System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.DependencyResolution.ProviderServicesFactory.GetInstance(String providerTypeName, String providerInvariantName) This error happened only on the Continuous Integration machine. On the devs machines, everything has fine. The classic problem – on my machine it’s working. The CI has the following configuration: TeamCity .NET 4.51 EF 6.0.2 VS2013 It see