Question

I want to implement a timeout on the execution of tasks in a project that uses the CCR. Basically when I post an item to a Port or enqueue a Task to a DispatcherQueue I want to be able to abort the task or the thread that its running on if it takes longer than some configured time. How can I do this?

Answer 1

Can you confirm what you are asking? Are you running a long-lived task in the Dispatcher? Killing the thread would break the CCR model, so you need to be able to signal to the thread to finish its work and yield. Assuming it’s a loop that is not finishing quick enough, you might choose to enqueue a timer:

var resultTimeoutPort = new Port<DateTime>();
dispatcherQueue.EnqueueTimer(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(RESULT_TIMEOUT), 
                             resultTimeoutPort);

and ensure the blocking thread has available a reference to resultTimeoutPort. In the blocking loop, one of the exit conditions might be:

do
{
    //foomungus amount of work
}while(resultTimeoutPort.Test()==null&&
       someOtherCondition)

Please post more info if I’m barking up the wrong tree.