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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T06:55:39+00:00

I have a scenario that I’m trying to turn into a more responsive UI

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I have a scenario that I’m trying to turn into a more responsive UI by pre-fetching some sub-elements of the results before they’re actually required by the user if possible. I’m unclear on how best to approach the threading, so I’m hoping someone can provide some advice.

Scenario

There is search form (.NET rich client) that enable the user to select an account for a given customer. The user searches for given text to find a collection of customers which are then displayed in a result grid. Then when the user selects a customer, the list of accounts for that customer are searched for and displayed in a second grid for user selection in order to make up the final context (that is an account) to open.

Existing System

I have this all running in a request/response manner using regular background threading to resolve customers and accounts for a customer respectively in direct response to the user selections. The UI is locked/disabled (but responsive) until the accounts are found.

Goal

What I want to achieve is to commence fetching of the accounts for the top N customers before the user has selected them… Where N is the number of items being displayed in the grid.

As the user scrolls the grid, the newly displayed items will be added to the “queue” to be fetched.

Questions

  1. Is the thread pool an appropriate mechanism for managing the threads? If so, can you force just a single queued work item to jump up in priority? – e.g. if the user selects that customer before they have started/finished fetching.
  2. If not, what else should I be doing?
  3. Either way, are you aware of any good blog posts and/or open source projects that exhibit this functionality?
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Yes, the threadpool is a good choice, maybe behind a Backgroundworker or .NET4’s TaskParallel library.

    But you cannot (should not) ‘bump’ a ThreadPool thread but I don’t think that is going to be useful anyway.

    What you should probably do is to use a thread-safe queue (of the top N items) and use 2+ threads to process the Queue. When an item is selected and not yet being processed you move it up or start a separate thread immediately.

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