Question

I have a task that runs periodically 10 second. I do some picturebox refreshing processes by reading database. What i want is to invoke or awaken the thread and do the refresh operation when i click a button immidiately. In short, i want the refresh task to be driven by not only time but also event together. Is this possible? If yes, how? The code block for the task is shown below.

while (true)
{
    // do some refresh operation
    Thread.Sleep(10000);
}

void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    // invoke or awaken thread
}

Answer 1

First off I’d advise you to drop the Thread + Sleep + Invoke combo for timed operations. It’s very ugly. There are timer classes for both WinForms and WPF to do these three things automatically (update the GUI periodically from the dispatcher thread). Check out System.Windows.Forms.Timer and System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherTimer.

Now for your specific question, you could simply define a common method for updating the GUI with what you need and call it both from the timer code and from a button handler.