Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 Quickstart Cookbook

Understanding async and await in .NET 4.5

The new asynchronous capabilities of .NET 4.5 rely on the async and await modifiers. Basically we have two important points here:

• The async modifier indicates to the compiler that a method or lambda expression is asynchronous—we call them async methods.
• The await operator, which can only be used within an async method, is applied to a task to suspend execution of the method until the task is complete. Meanwhile, the control is returned to the caller of that method.

How to do it...

Here we will use the async and await features in a basic way to clearly understand them.

1. Create a new Visual Studio project of type Console Application named caAsyncAwait.
2. Add a reference to the System.Net.Http assembly.
3. In the ...