The last couple of days I've been reading about async/await. Yesterday I found this video on Channel 9 what made wonder about some things. Please consider the slide below.

Aside from the issues Lucian Wischik addresses, I wondered about variable assignment. Say we changed the async void into async Task, and added await before the SendData call. This enables us to get the stream, assign the variable m_GetResponse, wait for two seconds and print it. But what happens to the variable? It could be written by a different thread than it is read. Do we need some sort of a memory barrier here, make the variable volatile, or perhaps something else? Could it still be null when we print it?