Question

I am very new to WPF. And just started learning threading.

Here is my scenario:
I’ve created a program with a button named START. When start button is clicked it starts to do some complex task in different thread. Just before beginning the complex task it also creates a UI elements in another STA thread (technically i don’t know what i am saying).

Here is a sample code:

// button click event
private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    System.Threading.Thread myThread = new System.Threading.Thread(
        () => buttonUpdate("Hello "));
    myThread.Start();
}

private void buttonUpdate(string text)
{
    System.Threading.Thread myThread = new System.Threading.Thread(createUI);
    myThread.SetApartmentState(System.Threading.ApartmentState.STA);

    // set the current thread to background so that it's existant will totally 
    // depend upon existance of main thread.
    myThread.IsBackground = true;
    myThread.Start();

    // Please don't read this loop it's just for my entertainment!
    for (int i = 0; i < 1000; i++)
    {
        System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(100);
        button1.updateControl(new Action(
            () => button1.Content = text + i.ToString()));
        if (i == 100)
            break;
    }

    // close main window after the value of "i" reaches 100;
    this.updateControl(new Action(()=>this.Close()));
}

// method to create UI in STA thread. This thread will be set to run 
// as background thread.


 private void createUI()
 {
     // Create Grids and other UI component here
 }

The above code succesfully does what i want to do. But do you think it’s the correct way? so far i don’t have any problem here.

EDIT: OOps I forgot to mention this class:

public static class ControlException
{
    public static void updateControl(this Control control, Action code)
    {
        if (!control.Dispatcher.CheckAccess())
            control.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(code);
        else
            code.Invoke();
    }
}

Answer 1

If you are using .NET 4.0 you might want to consider using the Task class from the Task parallel library. Read into it since you say you are new to threading. It’s much more flexible to use.

Also I think that this link could be very helpful to you:

http://www.albahari.com/threading/