Repeat after me, “Avoid async void!” (Now say that ten times fast!) Ha ha ha. You sound funny.

In C#, async void methods are a scourge upon your code. To understand why, I recommend this detailed Stephen Cleary article, Best Practices in Asynchronous Programming. In short, exceptions thrown when calling an async void method isn’t handled the same way as awaiting a Task and will crash the process. Not a great experience.

Recently, I found another reason to avoid async void methods. While investigating a bug, I noticed that the unit test that should have ostensibly failed because of the bug passed with flying colors. That’s odd. There was no logical reason for the test to pass given the bug.

Then I noticed that the return type of the method was async void. On a hunch I changed it to async Task and it started to fail. Ohhhhh snap!

If you write unit tests using xUnit.NET and accidentally mark them as async void instead of async Task, the tests are effectively ignored. I furiously looked for other cases where we did this and fixed them. UPDATE 2020-07-26: This is no longer true and probably has not been true for a long time still because of changes the xUnit.net team made.

Pretty much the only valid reason to use async void methods is in the case where you need an asynchronous event handler. But if you use Reactive Extensions, there’s an even better approach that I’ve written about before, Observable.FromEventPattern.

Because there are valid reasons for async void methods, Code analysis won’t flag them. For example, Code Analysis doesn’t flag the following method.

public async void Foo()
{
    await Task.Run(() => {});
}

It’s pretty easy to manually search for methods with that signature. You might even catch them in code review. But there are other ways where async void methods crop up that are extremely subtle. For example, take a look at the following code.

new Subject<Unit>().Subscribe(async _ => await Task.Run(() => {}));

Looks legit, right? You are wrong my friend. Take a shot of whiskey (or tomato juice if you’re a teetotaler)! Do it even if you were correct, because, hey! It’s whiskey (or tomato juice)!

If you look at all the overloads of Subscribe you’ll see that we’re calling one that takes in an Action<T> and not a Func<T, Task>. In other words, we’ve unwittingly passed in an async void lambda. Because of the beauty of type inference and extension methods, it’s hard to look at code like this and know whether that’s being called correctly. You’d have to know all the overloads as well as any extension methods in play.

Here I Come To Save The Day

Clearly I should tighten up code reviews to keep an eye out for this problem, right? Hell nah! Let a computer do this crap for you. I wrote some code I’ll share here to look out for this problem.

These tests make use of this method I wrote a while back to grab all loadable types from an assembly.

public static IEnumerable<Type> GetLoadableTypes(this Assembly assembly)
{
    if (assembly == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("assembly");
    try
    {
        return assembly.GetTypes();
    }
    catch (ReflectionTypeLoadException e)
    {
        return e.Types.Where(t => t != null);
    }
}

I also wrote this other extension method to make the final result a bit cleaner.

public static bool HasAttribute<TAttribute>(this MethodInfo method) where TAttribute : Attribute
{
    return method.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(TAttribute), false).Any();
}

And the power of Reflection compels you! Here’s a method that will return every async void method or lambda in an assembly.

public static IEnumerable<MethodInfo> GetAsyncVoidMethods(this Assembly assembly)
{
    return assembly.GetLoadableTypes()
      .SelectMany(type => type.GetMethods(
        BindingFlags.NonPublic
        | BindingFlags.Public
        | BindingFlags.Instance
        | BindingFlags.Static
        | BindingFlags.DeclaredOnly))
      .Where(method => method.HasAttribute<AsyncStateMachineAttribute>())
      .Where(method => method.ReturnType == typeof(void));
}

And using this method, I can write a helper method for all my unit tests.

public static void AssertNoAsyncVoidMethods(Assembly assembly)
{
    var messages = assembly
        .GetAsyncVoidMethods()
        .Select(method =>
            String.Format("'{0}.{1}' is an async void method.",
                method.DeclaringType.Name,
                method.Name))
        .ToList();
    Assert.False(messages.Any(),
        "Async void methods found!" + Environment.NewLine + String.Join(Environment.NewLine, messages));
}

Here’s an example where I use this method.

[Fact]
public void EnsureNoAsyncVoidTests()
{
    AssertExtensions.AssertNoAsyncVoidMethods(GetType().Assembly);
    AssertExtensions.AssertNoAsyncVoidMethods(typeof(Foo).Assembly);
    AssertExtensions.AssertNoAsyncVoidMethods(typeof(Bar).Assembly);
}

Here’s an example of the output. In this case, it found two async void lambdas.

------ Test started: Assembly: GitHub.Tests.dll ------

Test 'GitHub.Tests.IntegrityTests.EnsureNoAsyncVoidTests' failed: Async void methods found!
'<>c__DisplayClass10.<RetrievesOrgs>b__d' is an async void method.
'<>c__DisplayClass70.<ClearsExisting>b__6f' is an async void method.
	IntegrityTests.cs(104,0): at GitHub.Tests.IntegrityTests.EnsureNoAsyncVoidTests()

0 passed, 1 failed, 0 skipped, took 0.97 seconds (xUnit.net 1.9.2 build 1705).

These tests will help ensure my team doesn’t make this mistake again. It’s really subtle and easy to miss during code review if you’re not careful. Happy coding!