Question

I have a console application, and I want it to wait till some event is raised. But it executes the code and exits:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    var someObjectInstance = new SomeObject();
    someObjectInstance.SomeEvent += SomeEventHandler;
}

static void SomeEventHandler()
{
    //Some logic
}

I want to make my application behave like a Windows application where

Application.Run(new Form1());

is called and the message loop is run.

But I don’t need neither a message loop nor any form. So it looks like overhead. Is there a more light-weight way to achieve my goal?

Answer 1

First off, unless SomeObject is going to raise the event on a separate thread, this won’t work without some form of processing in SomeObject. If it’s designed that way, however, this is fairly straightforward.

A very efficient way of handling this is to just wait on a WaitHandle:

private static ManualResetEvent waitHandle = new ManualResetEvent(false);
static void Main(string[] args)
{
    var someObjectInstance = new SomeObject();
    someObjectInstance.SomeEvent += SomeEventHandler;
    waitHandle.WaitOne(); // Will block until event occurs
}

static void SomeEventHandler()
{
    //some logic
    waitHandle.Set(); // Will allow Main() to continue, exiting the program
}