Catch an exception thrown by an async void method

Question

Using the async CTP from Microsoft for .NET, is it possible to catch an exception thrown by an async method in the calling method?

public async void Foo()
{
         


        

Answer 1

This blog explains your problem neatly Async Best Practices.

The gist of it being you shouldn't use void as return for an async method, unless it's an async event handler, this is bad practice because it doesn't allow exceptions to be caught ;-).

Best practice would be to change the return type to Task. Also, try to code async all the way trough, make every async method call and be called from async methods. Except for a Main method in a console, which can't be async (before C# 7.1).

You will run into deadlocks with GUI and ASP.NET applications if you ignore this best practice. The deadlock occurs because these applications runs on a context that allows only one thread and won't relinquish it to the async thread. This means the GUI waits synchronously for a return, while the async method waits for the context: deadlock.

This behaviour won't happen in a console application, because it runs on context with a thread pool. The async method will return on another thread which will be scheduled. This is why a test console app will work, but the same calls will deadlock in other applications...