Question

Is there a way to wake a sleeping thread in C#? So, have it sleep for either a long time and wake it when you want work processed?

Answer 1

An AutoResetEvent object (or another WaitHandle implementation) can be used to sleep until a signal from another thread is received:

// launch a calculation thread
var waitHandle = new AutoResetEvent(false);
int result;
var calculationThread = new Thread(
    delegate
    {
        // this code will run on the calculation thread
        result = FactorSomeLargeNumber();
        waitHandle.Set();
    });
calculationThread.Start();

// now that the other thread is launched, we can do something else.
DoOtherStuff();

// we've run out of other stuff to do, so sleep until calculation thread finishes
waitHandle.WaitOne();