Question

I’ve never really used threading before in C# where I need to have two threads, as well as the main UI thread. Basically, I have the following.

public void StartTheActions()
{
  // Starting thread 1....
  Thread t1 = new Thread(new ThreadStart(action1));
  t1.Start();

  // Now, I want for the main thread (which is calling `StartTheActions` method)
  // to wait for `t1` to finish. I've created an event in `action1` for this.
  // The I wish `t2` to start...

  Thread t2 = new Thread(new ThreadStart(action2));
  t2.Start();
}

So, essentially, how can I have a thread wait for another one to finish? What is the best way to do this?

Answer 1

I can see five options available:

1. Thread.Join

As with Mitch’s answer. But this will block your UI thread, however you get a Timeout built in for you.

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2. Use a WaitHandle

ManualResetEvent is a WaitHandle as jrista suggested.

One thing to note is if you want to wait for multiple threads: WaitHandle.WaitAll() won’t work by default, as it needs an MTA thread. You can get around this by marking your Main() method with MTAThread – however this blocks your message pump and isn’t recommended from what I’ve read.

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3. Fire an event

See this page by Jon Skeet about events and multi-threading. It’s possible that an event can become unsubcribed between the if and the EventName(this,EventArgs.Empty) – it’s happened to me before.

(Hopefully these compile, I haven’t tried)

public class Form1 : Form
{
    int _count;

    void ButtonClick(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        ThreadWorker worker = new ThreadWorker();
        worker.ThreadDone += HandleThreadDone;

        Thread thread1 = new Thread(worker.Run);
        thread1.Start();

        _count = 1;
    }

    void HandleThreadDone(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        // You should get the idea this is just an example
        if (_count == 1)
        {
            ThreadWorker worker = new ThreadWorker();
            worker.ThreadDone += HandleThreadDone;

            Thread thread2 = new Thread(worker.Run);
            thread2.Start();

            _count++;
        }
    }

    class ThreadWorker
    {
        public event EventHandler ThreadDone;

        public void Run()
        {
            // Do a task

            if (ThreadDone != null)
                ThreadDone(this, EventArgs.Empty);
        }
    }
}

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4. Use a delegate

public class Form1 : Form
{
    int _count;

    void ButtonClick(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        ThreadWorker worker = new ThreadWorker();

        Thread thread1 = new Thread(worker.Run);
        thread1.Start(HandleThreadDone);

        _count = 1;
    }

    void HandleThreadDone()
    {
        // As before - just a simple example
        if (_count == 1)
        {
            ThreadWorker worker = new ThreadWorker();

            Thread thread2 = new Thread(worker.Run);
            thread2.Start(HandleThreadDone);

            _count++;
        }
    }

    class ThreadWorker
    {
        // Switch to your favourite Action<T> or Func<T>
        public void Run(object state)
        {
            // Do a task

            Action completeAction = (Action)state;
            completeAction.Invoke();
        }
    }
}

If you do use the _count method, it might be an idea (to be safe) to increment it using

Interlocked.Increment(ref _count)

I’d be interested to know the difference between using delegates and events for thread notification, the only difference I know are events are called synchronously.

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5. Do it asynchronously instead

The answer to this question has a very clear description of your options with this method.

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Delegate/Events on the wrong thread

The event/delegate way of doing things will mean your event handler method is on thread1/thread2 not the main UI thread, so you will need to switch back right at the top of the HandleThreadDone methods:

// Delegate example
if (InvokeRequired)
{
    Invoke(new Action(HandleThreadDone));
    return;
}