Question

I have a basic C# console application that executes a fairly long running process involving timers and asynchronous requests. The sole purpose of the Main() method is to initialize the timers and then let them do their thing for the next few hours.

I know that Windows Services are appropriate for many long running processes, but doesn’t feel appropriate for this use case (executed manually when needed, always terminated within a day, no hurdles of having to install the Service, etc).

Right now, I simply do:

while (true)
    Thread.Sleep(5000);

Throwing in a Thread.Sleep seems … dirty for some reason. Or is that really the best thing to do to stop the application from terminating before the async process are complete?

Answer 1

You could use one/multiple ManualResetEvent to communicate from the background threads to the foreground thread.

The foreground thread in Main could wait until all background threads signaled that they are finished.