CA2007: Do not directly await a Task

Article
09/05/2023

Property	Value
Rule ID	CA2007
Title	Do not directly await a Task
Category	Reliability
Fix is breaking or non-breaking	Non-breaking
Enabled by default in .NET 8	No

Cause

An asynchronous method awaits a Task directly.

Rule description

When an asynchronous method awaits a Task directly, continuation usually occurs in the same thread that created the task, depending on the async context. This behavior can be costly in terms of performance and can result in a deadlock on the UI thread. Consider calling Task.ConfigureAwait(Boolean) to signal your intention for continuation.

How to fix violations

To fix violations, call ConfigureAwait on the awaited Task. You can pass either true or false for the continueOnCapturedContext parameter.

Calling ConfigureAwait(true) on the task has the same behavior as not explicitly calling ConfigureAwait. By explicitly calling this method, you're letting readers know you intentionally want to perform the continuation on the original synchronization context.
Call ConfigureAwait(false) on the task to schedule continuations to the thread pool, thereby avoiding a deadlock on the UI thread. Passing false is a good option for app-independent libraries.

Example

The following code snippet generates the warning:

public async Task Execute()
{
    Task task = null;
    await task;
}

To fix the violation, call ConfigureAwait on the awaited Task:

public async Task Execute()
{
    Task task = null;
    await task.ConfigureAwait(false);
}

When to suppress warnings

This warning is intended for libraries, where the code may be executed in arbitrary environments and where code shouldn't make assumptions about the environment or how the caller of the method may be invoking or waiting on it. It is generally appropriate to suppress the warning entirely for projects that represent application code rather than library code; in fact, running this analyzer on application code (for example, button click event handlers in a WinForms or WPF project) is likely to lead to the wrong actions being taken.

You can suppress this warning in any situation where either the continuation should be scheduled back to the original context or where there is no such context in place. For example, when writing code in a button click event handler in a WinForms or WPF application, in general the continuation from an await should run on the UI thread, and thus the default behavior of scheduling the continuation back to the originating context is desirable. As another example, when writing code in an ASP.NET Core application, by default there is no SynchronizationContext or TaskScheduler, for which reason a ConfigureAwait wouldn't actually change any behavior.

Suppress a warning

If you just want to suppress a single violation, add preprocessor directives to your source file to disable and then re-enable the rule.

#pragma warning disable CA2007
// The code that's violating the rule is on this line.
#pragma warning restore CA2007

To disable the rule for a file, folder, or project, set its severity to none in the configuration file.

[*.{cs,vb}]
dotnet_diagnostic.CA2007.severity = none

For more information, see How to suppress code analysis warnings.

Configure code to analyze

Use the following options to configure which parts of your codebase to run this rule on.

Exclude async void methods
Output kind

You can configure all of these options for just this rule, for all rules it applies to, or for all rules in this category (Reliability) that it applies to. For more information, see Code quality rule configuration options.

Exclude async void methods

You can configure whether you want to exclude asynchronous methods that don't return a value from this rule. To exclude these kinds of methods, add the following key-value pair to an .editorconfig file in your project:

# Package version 2.9.0 and later
dotnet_code_quality.CA2007.exclude_async_void_methods = true

# Package version 2.6.3 and earlier
dotnet_code_quality.CA2007.skip_async_void_methods = true

Output kind

You can also configure which output assembly kinds to apply this rule to. For example, to only apply this rule to code that produces a console application or a dynamically linked library (that is, not a UI app), add the following key-value pair to an .editorconfig file in your project:

dotnet_code_quality.CA2007.output_kind = ConsoleApplication, DynamicallyLinkedLibrary

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