Question

I have a GUI that is for all intents and purposes really basic. A listview, an html form, and that’s really it.

I want the user to have the following behavioral ability:

1 – Click a checkbox that says “Real-time”. When clicked, a background thread will run once every 10 seconds.

2 – If there is a new file created (this is easy, to observe a new file) I want an alert displayed in my main gui. Where it is displayed for now is arbitrary (in a label, for example).

The main issue is I cannot figure out how to do this in a multi-threaded example. My goal is exactly in line with multithreading: do tasks 1 and 2, without locking task 1. Meaning, while the update check is running, the user can interact with the GUI as if nothing was going on in the background.

If you need more details to better answer this please let me know.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Here are a couple sites I found useful for implementing a background worker when I needed to perform database operations while still allowing the GUI to be responsive:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/zw97wx20.aspx

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/AsynchronousCodeBlocks.aspx