How to cancel a Task in await?

Read up on Cancellation (which was introduced in .NET 4.0 and is largely unchanged since then) and the Task-Based Asynchronous Pattern, which provides guidelines on how to use CancellationToken with async methods.

To summarize, you pass a CancellationToken into each method that supports cancellation, and that method must check it periodically.

private async Task TryTask()
{
  CancellationTokenSource source = new CancellationTokenSource();
  source.CancelAfter(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1));
  Task<int> task = Task.Run(() => slowFunc(1, 2, source.Token), source.Token);

  // (A canceled task will raise an exception when awaited).
  await task;
}

private int slowFunc(int a, int b, CancellationToken cancellationToken)
{
  string someString = string.Empty;
  for (int i = 0; i < 200000; i++)
  {
    someString += "a";
    if (i % 1000 == 0)
      cancellationToken.ThrowIfCancellationRequested();
  }

  return a + b;
}

Or, in order to avoid modifying slowFunc (say you don't have access to the source code for instance):

var source = new CancellationTokenSource(); //original code
source.Token.Register(CancelNotification); //original code
source.CancelAfter(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1)); //original code
var completionSource = new TaskCompletionSource<object>(); //New code
source.Token.Register(() => completionSource.TrySetCanceled()); //New code
var task = Task<int>.Factory.StartNew(() => slowFunc(1, 2), source.Token); //original code

//original code: await task;  
await Task.WhenAny(task, completionSource.Task); //New code

You can also use nice extension methods from https://github.com/StephenCleary/AsyncEx and have it looks as simple as:

await Task.WhenAny(task, source.Token.AsTask());