Question

Does anyone know a way to get notified when a specific thread is being suspended and resumed?

I would like to be able to to something like this:

thread.Suspended += delegate
{
    //Do something
};

thread.Resumed += delegate
{
    //Do something else
};

I doubt that the .Net Framework has this capability, but is there a technique to achieve this maybe with pinvoke? I need it to be possible with low overhead.

Answer 1

If you’re committed to writing your own thread pool this probably doesn’t help, but I’d try to stick with the .NET ThreadPool class and tune it as required with SetMaxThreads/SetMinThreads and GetMaxThreads/GetAvailableThreads. Is there any particular reason why this isn’t good enough?

I was at PDC last year and attended some of Joe Duffy’s talks on parallelism were quite interesting. I recall he was talking about providing an extensible thread pool class in .NET since MSFT generally find that when people go and write their own thread pools they’ll work fine most of the time, but get caught out in edge cases by various gotchas. By providing an extensibility mechanism they were hoping to limit the potential for devs to get caught out.