Question

I am curious. I run this in the background and i know when its done when i see the console disappear. I can check the status by clicking on it and see the output. Then i decided to add a quit button. It no longer disappears when done (it can stay alive for minutes or hours) but once i click on the console it ends. Why?

I wrote this to show an example of how my app runs. If you run it you’ll notice the problem. I compiled with msvc 2008 running on windows 7.

I notice now. It quits on an event like focus like mouse move, on of lose focus. etc. A still mouse on focus will not make it quit. Why? Any work around to killing the thread or avoid killing the thread and not eat cpu?

-edit- you can press q to quit

using System;
using System.Threading;

namespace ConsoleExitTest
{
    class Program
    {
        static object dummy = new object();
        static bool wantQuit = false;
        static void line() { while (wantQuit == false) { if (Console.ReadKey().Key == ConsoleKey.Q) { wantQuit = true; lock (dummy) { Monitor.Pulse(dummy); }; } } }
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            //opt stuff here
            Thread t = new Thread(line); t.Start();
            Console.WriteLine("My code here");

            for (int i = 0; i < 3 && wantQuit == false; i++)
            {
                lock (dummy)
                {
                    Monitor.Wait(dummy, 1000);
                }
            }
            wantQuit = false;
            t.Abort();
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

My guess would be its to do with the way Abort works with unmanaged code. See Complications with Thread.Abort.

You may want to change the ReadKey to a non blocking method How to add a Timeout to Console.ReadLine()? and then you can end the thread without Abort:

wantQuit = true;
t.Join();