Understanding the use of Task.Run + Wait() + async + await used in one line

Question

I'm a C# newbie, so I'm struggling to understand some concepts, and I run into a piece of code that I'm not quite understanding:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
 Task.Run(async () => { await SomeClass.Initiate(new Configuration()); }).Wait();
 while (true) ;
}

As I understand, this runs a task which initiates a method. This method runs, and then, once it finished, it gets into an infinite loop waiting. It feels that either the code doesn't make sense, or that I'm not understanding right.

Thanks

Answer 1

You can break this apart into several parts:

async () => { await SomeClass.Initiate(new Configuration()); }

Is a lambda expression that defines an async method that just awaits another method. This lambda is then passed to Task.Run:

Task.Run(async () => { await SomeClass.Initiate(new Configuration()); })

Task.Run executes its code on a thread pool thread. So, that async lambda will be run on a thread pool thread. Task.Run returns a Task which represents the execution of the async lambda. After calling Task.Run, the code calls Task.Wait:

Task.Run(async () => { await SomeClass.Initiate(new Configuration()); }).Wait();

This will block the main console app until the async lambda is completely finished.

If you want to see how it's broken out further, the following is roughly equivalent:

static async Task AnonymousMethodAsync()
{
  await SomeClass.Initiate(new Configuration());
}

static void Main(string[] args)
{
  var task = Task.Run(() => AnonymousMethodAsync());
  task.Wait();
  while (true) ;
}