Question

The usual practice is to show the progress window (with a progress bar) in the UI thread and update the progress from the worker thread.

I have a lot of long operations which are started and run in the GUI thread itself(which temporarily freeze the GUI). The requirement is to show the progress bar for all existing long operations. The usual solution would be to move the long operations as threads and update the progress from there. But i am not sure about the thread safety of those long operations.

Is there a way where we show the progress window in another thread (so it doesn’t freeze) and then update the progress from the main GUI thread itself?

Answer 1

I dont know a solution to show the ProgressBar in another thread, but a hack you can try ist to let the system execute its actions (Update the UI) from within your long running operations. For this, you can call the following function repeatedly from within your long running operations:

public static void DoEvents() {
  DispatcherFrame frame = new DispatcherFrame();
  Dispatcher.CurrentDispatcher.BeginInvoke(DispatcherPriority.Background, new DispatcherOperationCallback(delegate(object parameter) {
    frame.Continue = false;
    return null;
}), null);
  Dispatcher.PushFrame(frame);
}

But take care, this is not a nice way to resolve the problem. Better to chose an appropriate design.