Waiting for a keypress asynchronously in a C# console app

This one’s kind of specific, but sometimes when you’re writing a console app that does a lot of asynchronous stuff, and you want to cancel it at any time by pressing escape. 

via GIPHY

However, Console.ReadKey is blocking… so that’s not super great.

CancellationToken

First, make use of the cancellation tokens.  I’ve talked about them before, but they allow you to cancel in-flight asynchronous operations.  Essentially, we will want to create our own asynchronous task that waits for a key press and then cancels the cancellation token, thereby stopping whatever kind of asynchronous processes you have running.

Task.Run

Then you just need to launch this method inside of a Task so it can run asynchronously.

via GIPHY