The upside of choosing to learn a Microsoft-backed technology via their developer documentation site is that there'll be a lot of information. The downside is that it quickly becomes a flood of too much information, especially for things with a lot of surface area touching a lot of products. We end up with a section from each division, each introducing the concepts from their own perspectives. Resulting in a lot of redundant information though, thankfully in this case, I found nothing contradictory.

I started from the C# language side via the async keyword, which led me to a quick conceptual overview with a few short examples. Blitzing through this page got me oriented on the general direction, but it wasn't detailed enough for me to feel I understood. As a starting point it wasn't bad, but I needed to keep reading.

Next item I found was from the .NET side, and I was prepared for a long read with the title "Async in depth". It was indeed more in depth than the previous page, but it was not quite as in depth as I had hoped. Still, it corrected a few misconceptions in my head, such as the fact async behavior does not necessarily mean multiple threads. In I/O bound operations, there may be no dedicated waiting thread at all. It meant in certain situations, this mechanism is better than old-school multithreaded techniques I had known. For example this avoids the situation of building up large numbers of threads sitting around blocked and waiting.

I got more details -- and more detailed code walkthroughs -- when I broadened my focus from the async keyword itself to TAP or Task-based Asynchronous Pattern, the umbrella under which Microsoft designated not just the async/await pattern itself but also a bunch of other related mechanisms. This section also has a comparison of .NET asynchronous programming patterns, and TAP can interoperate with them. Which is not relevant to me personally but it's good to see Microsoft's habit for backwards compatibility is alive and well. This will be useful if I get into TAP and then something even newer and shinier comes along and I need to switch. I hope there aren't too many more of those, though, as the interop chart will get a lot more complicated and confusing very quickly.

These sections were informative, and I probably could have figured it out from there if I needed to get rolling on a short schedule. But I didn't have to. I had the luxury of time, and I found the gold mine that is the C# Programming Guide for Asynchronous Programming.