Question

I have a Windows Service implemented in C# that needs to do some work every so often. I’ve implemented this using a System.Threading.Timer with a callback method that is responsible for scheduling the next callback. I am having trouble gracefully stopping (i.e. disposing) the timer. Here’s some simplified code you can run in a console app that illustrates my problem:

const int tickInterval = 1000; // one second

timer = new Timer( state => {
                       // simulate some work that takes ten seconds
                       Thread.Sleep( tickInterval * 10 );

                       // when the work is done, schedule the next callback in one second
                       timer.Change( tickInterval, Timeout.Infinite );
                   },
                   null,
                   tickInterval, // first callback in one second
                   Timeout.Infinite );

// simulate the Windows Service happily running for a while before the user tells it to stop
Thread.Sleep( tickInterval * 3 );

// try to gracefully dispose the timer while a callback is in progress
var waitHandle = new ManualResetEvent( false );
timer.Dispose( waitHandle );
waitHandle.WaitOne();

The problem is that I get an ObjectDisposedException from timer.Change on the callback thread while waitHandle.WaitOne is blocking. What am I doing wrong?

The documentation for the Dispose overload I’m using says:

The timer is not disposed until all currently queued callbacks have completed.

Edit: It appears that this statement from the documentation may be incorrect. Can someone verify?

I know that I could work around the problem by adding some signaling between the callback and the disposal code as Henk Holterman suggested below, but I don’t want to do this unless absolutely necessary.

Answer 1

With this code

 timer = new Timer( state => {
                   // simulate some work that takes ten seconds
                   Thread.Sleep( tickInterval * 10 );

                   // when the work is done, schedule the next callback in one second
                   timer.Change( tickInterval, Timeout.Infinite );
               },
               null,
               tickInterval, // first callback in one second
               Timeout.Infinite );

it is almost certain that you will Dispose the timer while it is sleeping.

You will have to safeguard the code after Sleep() to detect a Disposed timer. Since there is no IsDisposed property a quick and dirty static bool stopping = false; might do the trick.