GetBlobReferenceFromServerAsync (and non-async) throw an exception with 404 (not found) if the blob doesn't exist.

Question

I'm trying to determine if a particular file exists in a blob store. I'm using container.GetBlobReferenceFromServerAsync and if the named blob does't exist I get an exception with a 404. ICloudBlob (which is returned by the method) defines an Exists method
but it's functionally useless because the GetBlobReferenceFromServerAsync method call itself throws the exception. I do get the behavior I'm looking for if I call container.GetBlockBlobReference instead but there's no async version of that method.

Answer 1

As I said I'd found that GetBlockBlobReference works but there's no async version of that method. I'm trying to determine IF a blob exists not create one. Since the GetBlobReferenceFromServer returns an ICloudBlob and ICloudBlob defines and Exists method
you'd assume that it could be used to determine if a blob exists. I'd argue that the fact that it throws and exception when the blob does not exist is a bug in the implementation because it makes the Exist method on the ICloudBlob object functionally useless.
Also, it seems like a fairly significant miss that there's no async version of GetBlockBlobReference. A query to a cloud resource is exactly the perfect use case for the async/await pattern.
Does anyone know of an async way to check for the existence of a blob that doesn't involve catching a 404 exception?