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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T02:35:13+00:00

In my Silverlight application, I have an operation that takes a couple seconds and

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In my Silverlight application, I have an operation that takes a couple seconds and strongly interacts with the GUI (creation of display objects in a big “for” statement)

At first I thought of using the BackgroundWorker to avoid freezing the interface. But I cannot update the GUI directly, so I used the Dispatcher.BeginInvoke, but it still freezes the interface (since the long actions are on the gui part).

What I’d want is display a BusyIndicator while it loads my objects but I want the user to be able to continue working while it loads.

What else can I do? Any suggestions?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Creating UI items in the BackgroundWorker is just wrong. Creating UI elements requires switching back to the UI thread if run from a BackgroundWorker. That is just making things worse than creating them on the main thread.

    I assume that lots of the work in the BackgroundWorker is not creating the elements but some additional processing that happens to create UI elements in the middle of everything else.
    If that is the case you need to break out the actual generation of UI elements. Replace the generation of UI elements with dummy-classes that contains all specifications required to build all elements. Then you return that collection of specifications (the dummy-classes) and generate the actual elements in the BackgroundWorker.RunWorkerCompleted event.

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