exception - How to safely call an async method in C# without await

Question

I have an async method which returns no data:

public async Task MyAsyncMethod()
{
    // do some stuff async, don't return any data
}

I'm calling this from another method which returns some data:

public string GetStringData()
{
    MyAsyncMethod(); // this generates a warning and swallows exceptions
    return "hello world";
}

Calling MyAsyncMethod() without awaiting it causes a "Because this call is not awaited, the current method continues to run before the call is completed" warning in visual studio. On the page for that warning it states:

You should consider suppressing the warning only if you're sure that you don't want to wait for the asynchronous call to complete and that the called method won't raise any exceptions.

I'm sure I don't want to wait for the call to complete; I don't need to or have the time to. But the call might raise exceptions.

I've stumbled into this problem a few times and I'm sure it's a common problem which must have a common solution.

How do I safely call an async method without awaiting the result?

Update:

For people suggesting that I just await the result, this is code that is responding to a web request on our web service (ASP.NET Web API). Awaiting in a UI context keeps the UI thread free, but awaiting in a web request call will wait for the Task to finish before responding to the request, thereby increasing response times with no reason.

Answer 1

If you want to get the exception "asynchronously", you could do:

  MyAsyncMethod().
    ContinueWith(t => Console.WriteLine(t.Exception),
        TaskContinuationOptions.OnlyOnFaulted);

This will allow you to deal with an exception on a thread other than the "main" thread. This means you don't have to "wait" for the call to MyAsyncMethod() from the thread that calls MyAsyncMethod; but, still allows you to do something with an exception--but only if an exception occurs.

Update:

technically, you could do something similar with await:

try
{
    await MyAsyncMethod().ConfigureAwait(false);
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
    Trace.WriteLine(ex);
}

...which would be useful if you needed to specifically use try/catch (or using) but I find the ContinueWith to be a little more explicit because you have to know what ConfigureAwait(false) means.