Question

I’m trying to take a console application and build a gui for it. I’ve got the main functions of my GUI working and added the console application files to my new project. I changed the namespace of the files to match that of the winform application and moved the main function of the console application into the Program class defining it as a function taking a CSV path argument which it gets from the form.

So it appears that program it functioning but Im having trouble getting the form to update. There are some Console.WriteLine() functions that I want to write to the toolStripStatusLabel and others to the richTextBox.

I’m new to C# and the main program wasnt written by me but Im trying to build on it.

Program.cs

Form1 Frm1 = new Form1();
Frm1.UpdateStatusBar("Sorted jobs by EDD....");
Frm1.Refresh();

Form1.cs

public void UpdateStatusBar(string status)
{
    Form1 Frm1 = new Form1();
    Frm1.toolStripStatusLabel1.Text = status;  
}

Pastebin Program.cs
See line 92.

Pastebin Form1.cs
See line 88.

Answer 1

As said by @Thinhbk, creating a new Form1 each time you are wanting to update the tool strip is not the way to to go. The other problem you have is that all of the processing is running in the same thread (I looked at the stuff you posted on Pastebin), meaning that you won’t see the progress updates until the end anyway.

To get this working, I first modifed the signature of the public void AX1Program(string path) method to this:

public void AX1Program(Form1 form1, ManualResetEvent resetEvent, string path)

Passing in the form means we can access the UpdateStatusBar method and resetEvent is used to signal when the thread is done. The body of AX1Program changes to this:

try
{
    ...
    //Do work as per normal
    ...
    form1.UpdateStatusBar("some new status");
}
catch (Exception)
{
    //Any exception handling/logging you may need.
}
finally
{
    //Indicate that we are done.
    resetEvent.Set();
}

Now, to invoke the AX1Program method, you currently have some code (it’s in a couple of places in your Writebutton_Click method):

Program Pgm1 = new Program();
Pgm1.AX1Program(CSVtextBox.Text);

We want to invoke this asynchronously, so we would instead go:

RunAX1Program(CSVtextBox.Text);

Which invokes the following two methods:

private void RunAX1Program(string text)
{
    ManualResetEvent resetEvent = new ManualResetEvent(false);
    ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(RunAX1ProgramDelegate,
        new object[] { resetEvent, text });
}

private void RunAX1ProgramDelegate(object state)
{
    object[] stateArray = (object[])state;
    ManualResetEvent resetEvent = (ManualResetEvent)stateArray[0];
    string text = (string)stateArray[1];

    Program program = new Program();
    program.AX1Program(this, resetEvent, text);
    //Wait until the event is signalled from AX1Program.
    resetEvent.WaitOne();
}

Because we are now wanting to update the tool strip from another thread, the UpdateStatusBar method will need to look like this so that we can safely modify the controls:

public void UpdateStatusBar(string status)
{
    if (this.InvokeRequired)
    {
        this.BeginInvoke((MethodInvoker)delegate
        {
            UpdateStatusBar(status);
        });
    }
    else
    {
        toolStripStatusLabel1.Text = status;
    }
}

You could then use a similar pattern to update your rich text box.