Fire-and-Forget Asynchronous Operations: Async/Await vs. the 'Old Async Delegate'—Which is Better?

Fire-and-Forget Asynchronous Operations in C#: Async/Await vs. Traditional Methods

The Fire-and-forget method is ideal for asynchronous operations that do not require explicit tracing. In C#, there are two main approaches: traditional asynchronous delegates and the newer async/await syntax.

Review of Async/Await

The async/await syntax simplifies fire-and-forget operations, eliminating the need to manually call EndInvoke() and close the handle. However, it requires explicit waiting for the task in the target method. This may be inconvenient for existing synchronous methods that need to be converted to asynchronous.

Performance and Cleanup Considerations

While async/await looks cleaner, it doesn't necessarily provide any significant performance benefits. Both methods involve allocating a new thread pool thread to perform the operation.

Asynchronously calling synchronous methods

Fire-and-forget conversion using async/await is not straightforward if the background method cannot be modified. One workaround is to create a wrapper async method that awaits Task.Run() on the synchronous method like this:

<code class="language-csharp">async Task DoAsync(string entry)
{
    await Task.Run(() => DoIt(entry));
}</code>

It is recommended to avoid using Async Void

As the answer shows, the error handling of async void methods is unpredictable and should be avoided if possible.

Simplify Fire-and-Forget using Task.Run()

For maximum simplicity, consider using Task.Run() directly to execute synchronous methods in a fire-and-forget manner without async/await:

<code class="language-csharp">Task.Run(() => DoIt(entry));</code>

This approach emulates the behavior of the "old async delegate" without the overhead of manually calling EndInvoke() and closing the handle.

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