Question

I obviously don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to parallel programming with .NET 4.0. I have a simple Windows app that starts a task to do some mindless work (outputting numbers 1-1000). I put a substantial pause in half way through to simulate a long running process. While this long pause is taking place, if I hit the Stop button, its event handler calls the Cancel method of CancellationTokenSource. I don’t want to do any further processing (in this case, outputting a message) in the Stop button’s event handler until the canceled task is done with its current iteration. How do I do this? I tried using Task.WaitAll, etc in the Stop button’s event handler, but that just throws an unhandled AggregateException. Here’s the code which will help explain my problem if run as described above:

  private Task t;
  private CancellationTokenSource cts;

  public Form1()
  {
     InitializeComponent();
  }

  private void startButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
  {
     statusTextBox.Text = "Output started.";

     // Create the cancellation token source.
     cts = new CancellationTokenSource();

     // Create the cancellation token.
     CancellationToken ct = cts.Token;

     // Create & start worker task.
     t = Task.Factory.StartNew(() => DoWork(ct), ct);
  }

  private void DoWork(CancellationToken ct)
  {
     for (int i = 1; i <= 1000; i++)
     {
        ct.ThrowIfCancellationRequested();

        Thread.Sleep(10);  // Slow down for text box outout.
        outputTextBox.Invoke((Action)(() => outputTextBox.Text = i + Environment.NewLine));

        if (i == 500)
        {
           Thread.Sleep(5000);
        }
     }
  }

  private void stopButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
  {
     cts.Cancel();

     Task.WaitAll(t);  // this doesn't work :-(

     statusTextBox.Text = "Output ended.";
  }

  private void exitButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
  {
     this.Close();
  }

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You would normally just use Task.Wait (instead of WaitAll), as it’s a single task. and then handled the exception appropriately:

private void stopButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    cts.Cancel();
    try
    {
        t.Wait();  // This will throw
    }
    catch (AggregateException ae)
    {
       ae.Handle<OperationCanceledException>(ce => true);
    }

    statusTextBox.Text = "Output ended.";
}

When you cancel a Task, the OperationCanceledException will get wrapped into an AggregateException and be thrown as soon as you call Wait() or try to get the Task’s Result (if it’s a Task<T>).

---

Purely for your information – This is one place, especially given what you’re doing here, where C# 5 simplifies things. Using the new async support, you can write this as:

// No need for "t" variable anymore 
// private Task t;


private async void startButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
   statusTextBox.Text = "Output started.";

   // Create the cancellation token source.
   cts = new CancellationTokenSource();

   try
   {
      // Create & start worker task.
      await Task.Run(() => DoWork(cts.Token));
      statusTextBox.Text = "Output ended.";
   }
   catch(OperationCanceledException ce) 
   {
      // Note that we get "normal" exception handling
      statusTextBox.Text = "Operation canceled.";
   }
}

private void stopButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
   // Just cancel the source - nothing else required here
   cts.Cancel();
}