I’m kind of new to Windows Forms. The Windows Forms app I’ve created is the front-end to a component that does very time-consuming data transformation tasks. The data transformation task emits events which the form subscribes to.
When the form receives an event, it alters the text in a label and calls Refresh() for that label.
When I run the process from the form, it remains responsive and updates the label text for maybe a minute or so. After that, it simply freezes and Windows declares the process ‘Unresponsive’ until the data transformation is finished, at which time the form unfreezes and the label shows that the data transformation is complete (as expected).
I haven’t put the data transformation onto a separate thread – is this the first thing I should try? Can events cross threads? If not, what else should I do?
Yes, threading is where you should be working. Multi threading in WinForms, depending on your version, can be tricky.
If you’re using .NET 4.0 or higher, you could be using the Microsoft Task Parallel Library.
Otherwise, there is a good article, here, from C# Corner that covers threading in WinForms applications that I’d suggest as a starting point.
The BackgroundWorker is another option for simplifying threading in WinForms.