Question

I’m currently working on a WPF/C# application which is connected to an external camera. This application gets a snapshot from the camera, then does some analysis and displays it to the screen via a user interface. There are also many other UI elements on the interface (such as buttons, menus, and comboboxes). Right now, while the application is running, the user interface is notably slowed–for instance, a combobox, once clicked, may freeze up for just a second before opening. Then it may freeze again before allowing a user to select a value. I’m pretty sure this is due to the getting of the snapshot happening on the same thread as all the UI, however, I am very naive about using threads properly and really am at a complete loss as how I can go about correctly this issue. Basically, I want the UI to not be noticable slower at all even though the fastest I can retrieve images seems to be about 1 / second from the camera. How could I go about splitting this into multiple threads? AND would that even help my problem any? Thanks so much; any help is deeply appreciated.

Answer 1

If not using .NET 4, you can use the BackgroundWorker.

BackgroundWorker worker = new BackgroundWorker();

worker.DoWork += (s, e) => 
{
    // Perform things on the background thread here.
};
worker.RunWorkerCompleted += (s, e) =>
{
    // Code to be run after the thread is done, on the UI-thread.
};
worker.RunWorkerAsync();