Question

Consider a hypothetical method of an object that does stuff for you:

public class DoesStuff {     BackgroundWorker _worker = new BackgroundWorker();      ...      public void CancelDoingStuff()     {         _worker.CancelAsync();          //todo: Figure out a way to wait for BackgroundWorker to be cancelled.     } } 

How can one wait for a BackgroundWorker to be done?

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In the past people have tried:

while (_worker.IsBusy) {     Sleep(100); } 

But this deadlocks, because IsBusy is not cleared until after the RunWorkerCompleted event is handled, and that event can’t get handled until the application goes idle. The application won’t go idle until the worker is done. (Plus, it’s a busy loop – disgusting.)

Others have add suggested kludging it into:

while (_worker.IsBusy) {     Application.DoEvents(); } 

The problem with that is that is Application.DoEvents() causes messages currently in the queue to be processed, which cause re-entrancy problems (.NET isn’t re-entrant).

I would hope to use some solution involving Event synchronization objects, where the code waits for an event – that the worker’s RunWorkerCompleted event handlers sets. Something like:

Event _workerDoneEvent = new WaitHandle();  public void CancelDoingStuff() {     _worker.CancelAsync();     _workerDoneEvent.WaitOne(); }  private void RunWorkerCompletedEventHandler(sender object, RunWorkerCompletedEventArgs e) {     _workerDoneEvent.SetEvent(); } 

But I’m back to the deadlock: the event handler can’t run until the application goes idle, and the application won’t go idle because it’s waiting for an Event.

So how can you wait for an BackgroundWorker to finish?

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Update People seem to be confused by this question. They seem to think that I will be using the BackgroundWorker as:

BackgroundWorker worker = new BackgroundWorker(); worker.DoWork += MyWork; worker.RunWorkerAsync(); WaitForWorkerToFinish(worker); 

That is not it, that is not what I’m doing, and that is not what is being asked here. If that were the case, there would be no point in using a background worker.

Answer 1

If I understand your requirement right, you could do something like this (code not tested, but shows the general idea):

private BackgroundWorker worker = new BackgroundWorker(); private AutoResetEvent _resetEvent = new AutoResetEvent(false);  public Form1() {     InitializeComponent();      worker.DoWork += worker_DoWork; }  public void Cancel() {     worker.CancelAsync();     _resetEvent.WaitOne(); // will block until _resetEvent.Set() call made }  void worker_DoWork(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e) {     while(!e.Cancel)     {         // do something     }      _resetEvent.Set(); // signal that worker is done }