When developing the original Windows Runtime for Windows 8.x, Microsoft followed a design guideline in which any synchronous method that might take longer than 50 ms to complete was to be removed and replaced with an asynchronous version. The goal behind this design decision is to dramatically improve the chances of developers building applications that feel smooth and fluid by not blocking threads on framework calls.

In this recipe, you're going to revisit the RSS feed reader concept, just as you did in the Making your code asynchronous recipe, though this time you're going to be creating a UWP application.

There are a few differences between a UWP application and a console one, including differences in the classes available. For example, the WebClient class doesn't exist in WinRT, so you'll be using the HttpClient class instead.

For additional variety, we will be writing this app using Visual Basic, but of course, the concepts are...