Question

First of all, I am using Visual Studio 10 and coding Windows Forms App. I am not experienced with threads in C#.

I have a C# app which uses my C# DLL that listens to a Network Stream, and parses the data it receives. The parsed data is used to insert/update the rows of the Datatable which is bound to the DataGridView that is located on the main form.

I have tried this first with a worker thread which is started inside the DLL. The DataTable which is bound to the DataGridView is passed as a parameter to the DLL. And then the thread starts. The thread function was something like this;

private void ListenThread()

    {
        Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture =
            System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture;
        while (m_Active)
        {
            Thread.Sleep(100);
            int lData = m_Stream.Read(m_Buffer, 0,
                  m_Client.ReceiveBufferSize);
            String myString = Encoding.UTF7.GetString(m_Buffer);
            myString = myString.Substring(0, lData);
            ParseString(myString);

        }
    }

The ParseString() method parses the data and inserts a row to the DataTable or updates the existing ones.

This code was working well, until I tried to run the app with CTRL+F5 instead of F5. The UI became unresponsive after a few seconds later it began to fill the Grid.

I have googled this and found that I should use BeginInvoke to prevent the UI from freezing. But I was not successful to implement that.

I tried something like

TCPListener Listener = new TCPListener(ListenThread);
IAsyncResult result = Listener.BeginInvoke(null, null);

instead of

Thread m_tidListen = new Thread(new ThreadStart(ListenThread));

but it worked the same way. Still doesnt work with “without debugging mode”.

How should I implement this with BeginInvoke? Or should I try something else?

Answer 1

Since you are building winforms already, you might as well use a BackGroundWorker for this kind of thing. They are made for doing stuff in the Background while keeping your form responsive. For example:

private void backgroundWorker1_DoWork(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e)
    {
        //do your time consuming stuff
        while (m_Active)
        {
            Thread.Sleep(100);
            int lData = m_Stream.Read(m_Buffer, 0,
                  m_Client.ReceiveBufferSize);
            String myString = Encoding.UTF7.GetString(m_Buffer);
            e.result = myString.Substring(0, lData);

            ParseString(e.Result.ToString());
        }

    }

 private void backgroundWorker1_RunWorkerCompleted(object sender, RunWorkerCompletedEventArgs e)
    {
        //update your UI if needed
    }