The main purpose of async/await is to handle the bookkeeping work when you make asynchronous calls.

When you do asynchronous work, there’s often some context you have to be aware of. For example, you can’t touch the UI from any thread but the special “UI thread”. There are two rules about this:

  1. Only the UI thread may update the UI.
  2. Don’t block the UI thread with long-running work.

If you have a long computation, you can spawn a thread so the UI thread isn’t blocked, but you must remember to get back onto the UI thread before you touch any controls:

void ButtonPressed(sender s, EventArgs e)
{
    // Start some calculation on a background thread
    new Thread(new ThreadStart(() =>
    {
        var answer = Factorial(1000000);
        // Get back onto the UI thread before continuing
        Invoke(() =>
        {
            answerTextBox.Text = answer.ToString();
        });
    }));
}

In WinForms, the UI thread is your “context” you have to get back after doing some asynchronous work. You use Invoke(action) to do that.

Before C# 5, this could be painful, but async and await make it a piece of cake. They make that mess as simple as:

async void ButtonPressed(sender s, EventArgs e)
{
    var answer = await FactorialOnThreadPoolThreadAsync(1000000);

    // The await got us back onto the UI thread automatically
    answerTextBox.Text = answer.ToString();
}

(I cheated a little by assuming somebody wrote FactorialOnThreadPoolThreadAsync(int) for me).

That little await keyword did all of this for you:

  1. Save the task returned by FactorialOnThreadPoolThreadAsync()

  2. Capture the current “SynchronizationContext”

  3. Schedule the rest of ButtonPressed() to run with the current SynchronizationContext when the task completes. Since this is a WinForms app, that means it gets us back onto the thread we started on.

Notice that await captures a SynchronizationContext, not a thread. In a WinForms app, these pretty much mean the same thing, but in an ASP.NET app, they don’t. In ASP.NET, the SynchronizationContext contains the request context: Who is authenticated, what session state is available, etc., almost none of which is specific to the thread.

The details of all this aren’t usually important to understand. The important thing to remember is “using await gets me back where I was before the asynchronous call”.