Suppressing "warning CS4014: Because this call is not awaited, execution of the current method continues..."

This is not a duplicate of "How to safely call an async method in C# without await".

How do I nicely suppress the following warning?

warning CS4014: Because this call is not awaited, execution of the current method continues before the call is completed. Consider applying the 'await' operator to the result of the call.

A simple example:

static async Task WorkAsync()
{
    await Task.Delay(1000);
    Console.WriteLine("Done!");
}

static async Task StartWorkAsync()
{
    WorkAsync(); // I want fire-and-forget 

    // more unrelated async/await stuff here, e.g.:
    // ...
    await Task.Delay(2000); 
}

What I tried and did not like:

static async Task StartWorkAsync()
{
    #pragma warning disable 4014
    WorkAsync(); // I want fire-and-forget here
    #pragma warning restore 4014
    // ...
}

static async Task StartWorkAsync()
{
    var ignoreMe = WorkAsync(); // I want fire-and-forget here
    // ...
}

Updated, since the original accepted answer has been edited, I've changed the accepted answer to the one using C# 7.0 discards, as I don't think ContinueWith is appropriate here. Whenever I need to log exceptions for fire-and-forget operations, I use a more elaborate approach proposed by Stephen Cleary here.


With C# 7 you can now use discards:

_ = WorkAsync();

You can create an extension method that will prevent the warning. The extension method can be empty or you can add exception handling with .ContinueWith() there.

static class TaskExtensions
{
    public static void Forget(this Task task)
    {
        task.ContinueWith(
            t => { WriteLog(t.Exception); },
            TaskContinuationOptions.OnlyOnFaulted);
    }
}

public async Task StartWorkAsync()
{
    this.WorkAsync().Forget();
}

However ASP.NET counts the number of running tasks, so it will not work with the simple Forget() extension as listed above and instead may fail with the exception:

An asynchronous module or handler completed while an asynchronous operation was still pending.

With .NET 4.5.2 it can be solved by using HostingEnvironment.QueueBackgroundWorkItem:

public static Task HandleFault(this Task task, CancellationToken cancelToken)
{
    return task.ContinueWith(
        t => { WriteLog(t.Exception); },
        cancelToken,
        TaskContinuationOptions.OnlyOnFaulted,
        TaskScheduler.Default);
}

public async Task StartWorkAsync()
{
    System.Web.Hosting.HostingEnvironment.QueueBackgroundWorkItem(
        cancelToken => this.WorkAsync().HandleFault(cancelToken));
}