How to create an async method in C# 4 according to the best practices?

Question

Consider the following code snippet:

public static Task FetchAsync()
{
    string url = \"http://www.example.com\", message = \"Hello World!\";         


        

Answer 1

You're correct in thinking that the Waits are unnecessary - Result will block until a result is ready.

---

However, an even easier way would be to base it off use the examples provided in the ParallelExtensionsExtras library.

They have made extensions for WebClient which do exactly what you're looking for:

static Task<string> FetchAsync()
{
    string url = "http://www.example.com", message = "Hello World!";

    return new WebClient().UploadStringTask(url, "POST", message);
}

You can read more about it in this post on the Parallel Programming with .NET blog.

Answer 2

If async related C# 4.0 code is huge and ugly - there is a chance that it's implemented properly. If it's nice and short, then most likely it's not ;)

..though, you may get it look more attractive by creating extension methods on WebRequest, Stream classes and cleanup the main method.

P.S.: I hope C# 5.0 with it's new async keyword and library will be released soon.

Reference: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/async.aspx