The Daily WTF

Asynchronous programming is hard. Because it’s so difficult, developers are constantly trying to find ways to make it simpler, whether it’s promises or callbacks, or the async/await pattern. It gets more difficult when you need to deal with handling exceptions- when a task fails, trying to recover from that failure in a separate thread is an extra special challenge.

Which brings us to Betty’s co-worker. Using C#’s Task objects, which tie into the async/await pattern, they wanted to simply ignore any exceptions thrown by one of those tasks. That’s your first WTF, of course. Their approach, however, is a larger one:

public static void Forget(this Task task) { task.ContinueWith(task2 => { try { task.Wait(); } #pragma warning disable 168 catch (Exception ex) #pragma warning restore 168 { // ignored } }).ConfigureAwait(false); }

First, let’s talk about ContinueWith. ContinueWith is meant as a continuation for a task. By continuation,

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