Question

I am one of those accidental programmer so I don’t have that much knowledge regarding programming best practice.

I have an application that currently uses 4 Background Worker.

So I declare them:

private BackgroundWorker bw1;
private BackgroundWorker bw2;
private BackgroundWorker bw3;
private BackgroundWorker bw4;

Then configure them:

bw1 = new BackgroundWorker();
bw1.WorkerReportsProgress = true;
bw1.DoWork += new DoWorkEventHandler(bw1_DoWork);
bw1.RunWorkerCompleted += new RunWorkerCompletedEventHandler(bw1_RunWorkerCompleted);
bw1.ProgressChanged += new ProgressChangedEventHandler(bw_ProgressChanged);

bw2 = new BackgroundWorker();
bw2.WorkerReportsProgress = true;
bw2.DoWork += new DoWorkEventHandler(bw2_DoWork);
bw2.RunWorkerCompleted += new RunWorkerCompletedEventHandler(bw2_RunWorkerCompleted);
bw2.ProgressChanged += new ProgressChangedEventHandler(bw_ProgressChanged);

bw3 = new BackgroundWorker();
bw3.WorkerReportsProgress = true;
bw3.DoWork += new DoWorkEventHandler(bw3_DoWork);
bw3.RunWorkerCompleted += new RunWorkerCompletedEventHandler(bw3_RunWorkerCompleted);
bw3.ProgressChanged += new ProgressChangedEventHandler(bw_ProgressChanged);

bw4 = new BackgroundWorker();
bw4.WorkerReportsProgress = true;
bw4.DoWork += new DoWorkEventHandler(bw4_DoWork);
bw4.RunWorkerCompleted += new RunWorkerCompletedEventHandler(bw4_RunWorkerCompleted);
bw4.ProgressChanged += new ProgressChangedEventHandler(bw_ProgressChanged);

And then I use the bw1.RunWorkerAsync(), bw2.RunWorkerAsync(), and so on…

The thing is I never call them simultaneously, they are call at different point in a pretty linear way.

So my question is, is it better to have many “pre-configured” background workers or to have one and change the DoWork and RunWorkerCompleted events according to what I want it to do?

Answer 1

From an architectural point of view, it is best to have a separate background worker for each background task, that is logically unrelated to another tasks of the class.