Question

I am creating a C# server for a game that I am creating and am new to multithreading and socket programming. My server should be able to hold multiple clients all in seperate threads. My server is run as a console application. My only problem is that when one of my test clients exits the application I don’t know how to stop the thread that they were running. How do you stop a thread while its running?

Answer 1

I’m going to assume that your threads are essentially message-processing threads that wait for a request from the client and then service a response. If that is the case, your thread’s main loop might look something like the HandleClientRequests method below. Note that this example assumes a graceful disconnect. A robust implementation would also account for the possibility that a client disconnects without executing the proper shutdown sequence or that the connection fails at some point.

public class ClientConnection {
    private Socket _socket;        

    public ClientConnection(Socket socket) {
        _socket = socket;
        new Thread(HandleClientRequests);
    }

    /* snip */

    public void HandleClientRequests() {
        bool disconnectRequested = false;
        while(!disconnectRequested) {
            var message = ReadNextMessageFromSocket();
            if(message.Type == MessageType.CloseConnection) {
                disconnectRequested = true;
            } else {
                //service request and send response
            }
        }
        ShutdownConnection();
        //after this point the thread terminates
    }
}

Whatever the case, you’re ThreadStart method should usually have some kind of loop, within which you do whatever it is you want your thread to do, and that loop should have a condition that is used to signal that it’s time for the thread to terminate.