Question

I’m a tad new to C# so please bear with me!

I am writing a program to send code via RS232 to a home made telescope mount.

The issues I have at the moment is hopefully very simple (But quite difficult for me!)

As an example say I have a button, I want to execute a loop when the left mouse button is held down, (which will be a continuous stream of 232 data), then when the left mouse button is released I need the loop to stop and to execute another line of code.

I sincerely hope that information I have given is enough and somebody is kind enough to help me along (I have searched the internet for answers believe me!)

Many thanks.

Answer 1

Hook into the MouseDown and MouseUp events on the button. The MouseDown event should spawn a thread, or signal to the thread to begin executing the loop. The MouseUp event should signal to the thread to stop executing the loop.

Something like this:

public class InterruptibleLoop
{
    private volatile bool stopLoop;
    private Thread loopThread;

    public void Start() {
        // If the thread is already running, do nothing.
        if (loopThread != null) {
            return;
        }

        // Reset the "stop loop" signal.
        stopLoop = false;

        // Create and start the new thread.
        loopThread = new Thread(LoopBody);
        loopThread.Start();
    }

    public void Stop() {
        // If the thread is not running, do nothing.
        if (loopThread == null) {
            return;
        }

        // Signal to the thread that it should stop looping.
        stopLoop = true;

        // Wait for the thread to terminate.
        loopThread.Join();

        loopThread = null;
    }

    private void LoopBody() {
        while (!stopLoop) {
            // Do your work here
        }
    }
}