Synchronously waiting for an async operation, and why does Wait() freeze the program here

The await inside your asynchronous method is trying to come back to the UI thread.

Since the UI thread is busy waiting for the entire task to complete, you have a deadlock.

Moving the async call to Task.Run() solves the issue.
Because the async call is now running on a thread pool thread, it doesn't try to come back to the UI thread, and everything therefore works.

Alternatively, you could call StartAsTask().ConfigureAwait(false) before awaiting the inner operation to make it come back to the thread pool rather than the UI thread, avoiding the deadlock entirely.

Calling async code from synchronous code can be quite tricky.

I explain the full reasons for this deadlock on my blog. In short, there's a "context" that is saved by default at the beginning of each await and used to resume the method.

So if this is called in an UI context, when the await completes, the async method tries to re-enter that context to continue executing. Unfortunately, code using Wait (or Result) will block a thread in that context, so the async method cannot complete.

The guidelines to avoid this are:

1. Use ConfigureAwait(continueOnCapturedContext: false) as much as possible. This enables your async methods to continue executing without having to re-enter the context.
2. Use async all the way. Use await instead of Result or Wait.

If your method is naturally asynchronous, then you (probably) shouldn't expose a synchronous wrapper.

Here is what I did

private void myEvent_Handler(object sender, SomeEvent e)
{
  // I dont know how many times this event will fire
  Task t = new Task(() =>
  {
    if (something == true) 
    {
        DoSomething(e);  
    }
  });
  t.RunSynchronously();
}

working great and not blocking UI thread