Question

Skip to the bottom for the question; this is just some extra info

I am using a component (GeckoFX) to render some websites, well fine, yet it can only be used in a Windows Form; as it has to bind to a WinForms object that can be drawn. Because all the WinForms are running in the same thread, I can only use one GeckoFX instance at a time; so I decided to create a ‘worker class’ in the form of a WinForm, and add all the logic in there. The form doesn’t require to communicate with the main form.

Now I can fire up 10 windows, and they will eventually work, but every new form will wait before all the other forms have handled all their GeckoFX events, as you cannot use multiple instances on one thread. Furthermore, the browser has to be on a UIThread. So:

Is it possible to create multiple UI Threads (one for each form)?

I have seen someone doing it ([edit: removed ‘bad’ link]), yet no one ever got his code samples working. The guy who got it working originally used some form of custom message pumping to do this kind of things, but I have no clue how to achieve something like that.

Answer 1

I don’t think that what you ask is really what you want but creating a message pump per thread is easy, you just have to call Application.Run once per thread.

static class Program
{
    /// <summary>
    /// The main entry point for the application.
    /// </summary>
    [STAThread]
    static void Main()
    {
        Thread t1 = new Thread(Main_);
        Thread t2 = new Thread(Main_);

        t1.Start();
        t2.Start();

        t1.Join();
        t2.Join();
    }

    static void Main_()
    {
        Application.EnableVisualStyles();
        Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault(false);
        Application.Run(new Form1());
    }
}