Question

Is doing this less efficient than setting up a background worker thread? Because it is working well and seems cleaner. In the loop I am calling BeginInvoke 3x – to add rows to main window datagrid, and to update the progress bar and message.

public MyConstructor()
{
    InitializeComponent();

    ThreadStart start = delegate()
    {
        for (...)
        {
            ...
            MyWindow.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(DispatcherPriority.Normal,
                new Action(delegate()
                {
                    // Do something on the MyWindow thread.
                }
            ));
            ...
        }

        // Intensive loop now done and we close this processing window.
        this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(DispatcherPriority.Normal,
            new Action(delegate()
            {
                this.Close();
            }
        ));
    }; // ThreadStart

    new Thread(start).Start();
}

Answer 1

It’s OK-ish, but a few points:

• You should probably be setting IsBackground on the Thread object, so that it doesn’t cause your application to hang at exit.
• If this is a short-running activity, then you shouldn’t create a new thread, instead use ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem or the new ‘Task’ stuff on .NET4.
• If there’s an unhandled exception on your background thread (either pool or manually created), the app’s going to fail with very little you can do about it. Things like ‘Task’ handled that better.

You don’t really qualify ‘efficient’ very clearly, but BackgroundWorker is generally a better way of doing this sort of thing – if nothing else, it will use a pool thread, which is much cheaper than a manually created thread.