Question

Could someone tell me in simple layman terms, what a WPF Dispatcher object is?

Also, I sometimes see this line of code in the constructor of an object. What does Dispatcher.CurrentDispatcher represent?

Dispatcher dispatcher = Dispatcher.CurrentDispatcher;

I know this has got something to do with making sure you don’t access objects from a thread different from the thread that owns the object, but I’m having trouble wrapping my head around exactly what a Dispatcher is/does.

Answer 1

I think the MSDN page should give a good description, in short:

The Dispatcher maintains a prioritized queue of work items for a specific thread.

And the CurrentDispatcher:

If a Dispatcher is not associated with the current thread, a new Dispatcher will be created. This is not the case with the FromThread method. FromThread will return null if there is not a dispatcher associated with the specified thread.