So far, all of our database operations with Entity Framework have been synchronous. In other words, our .NET program waited for any given database operation, such as a query or an update, to complete before moving forward. In many cases, there is nothing wrong with this approach. There are use cases, however, where an ability to perform such operations asynchronously is important. In these cases, we let .NET use its execution thread while the software waits for the database operation to complete. For example, if you are creating a web application utilizing the asynchronous approach, we can be more efficient with server resources, releasing web worker threads back to the thread pool while we are waiting for the database to finish processing a request, whether it is a save or retrieve operation. Even in a desktop application, the asynchronous API is useful because the user can potentially perform other tasks in the application, instead of waiting on a possibly time-consuming...