Question

I’m currently developing a project with XNA that is pulling information (ID, name, file location, etc) about each of my objects (each object will be displayed on screen) from a local SQL database.

I’d like to run my database queries on a separate thread so the rendered screen doesn’t freeze if the database hangs or some other unforeseen event occurs. I’m using XNA 4.0 and the application will only be running on windows. Is this possible, and if so, how?

Answer 1

There are a number of options available. Generally speaking you need the query to run in a separate thread. You can use

1. Thread pool

   • QueueUserWorkItem
   • Tasks
   • Background worker
   • Async calls to the database
   • Parallel invoke

2. Manually created threads here and here

I would start with thread pooling and see how that works, dedicated manual threads are not that robust in terms of memory management and reuse.