Question

Not quite sure how to do this or if it even is a proper way to program c#. Maybe I need to rethink what I am trying to do, but I need some help.

I have a wpf application that starts/stops a service and also uses a named pipe to open a port and communicate with the service. So when the service needs to it can send a message to the app. I started a new thread to invoke a Wait() method that sits at namedPipeServerStream.WaitForConnection(). This works fine, but when the service is stopped I send a message to the app so it breaks the WaitForConnection, however I dont want to kill this thread, I want to reinvoke the same method and wait in a loop until the service starts again. Not sure of the best way to do this.

The code I have so far is below.

void Wait()
{
    while (!ServiceControl.ServiceRunning)
    {
        Thread.Sleep(250);
        if (exitProgram == true)
        {
            break;
        }
    }

    while (ServiceControl.ServiceRunning)
    {
        try
        {
            NamedPipeServerStream namedPipeServerStream = new NamedPipeServerStream("pipeName");
            namedPipeServerStream.WaitForConnection();
            byte[] buffer = new byte[255];
            namedPipeServerStream.Read(buffer, 0, 255);
            string request = ASCIIEncoding.ASCII.GetString(buffer);

            if (request != null)
            {
                if (request == "pipeExit") 
                {
                    Wait(); //Reinvoke Wait if svc calls to exit
                } 

                else
                {
                    //Do work on message
                }
            }
            namedPipeServerStream.Close();
        }
        catch (Exception){}
    }

    if (_opener.exitProgram == true)
    {
        Application.Current.Dispatcher.InvokeShutdown();
    }

Answer 1

Why don’t you put a while(!opener.exitProgram) around your entire Wait implementation? That way you’ll get back to the start once the pipe is closed.