Everything you (don't) want to know about async and await in C#

C#'s Task-based async/await is a quite pervasive asynchronous programming model. Its beauty is encapsulated in syntactic succinctness to utilize hardware resources efficiently while maintaining sequential readability of the code.

The comprising language keywords, compiler features and framework types unlock immense semantic power:

• asynchronous operations and continuations
• error handling
• cooperative cancellation
• progress reporting
• asynchronous disposal
• asynchronous streams
  and much more.

The apparent simplicity - in some cases - may conceal the root cause of performance bottlenecks or unexpected behavior. But by gaining a deep understanding of the Async State Machine, which is the core driver of the control flow in asynchronous logic, developers can unveil potential issues with ease. An in-depth expertise of these implementation details enables authors to design reusable libraries and publish responsive applications.

In this code-heavy session, we will demystify the most prevalent aspects of C#'s async and await, as well as related .NET types.