These tutorials assume you already have some experience programming in C#.
The tutorials are designed to be used with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2008 or
later. This code can be used in other development environments but all the
instructions will be for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET so you will be on
your own to make it work in other IDEs.
Have you ever had your GUI freeze while reading or writing a large file and you
wonder if there was a way to keep your GUI responsive?
Well there is a way and it's called threading. Essentially what you will do is
create another process in memory for doing work while your main process
continues to serve the GUI.
There are three types of threads you can make, Simple, Messaged and Advanced.
With a Simple thread a single Worker thread is created. The Worker is given
some start up parameters and it then leaves to work on it's own until complete.
There is no inter-process communication.
A Messaged thread is the same as a Simple thread except messages are passed
between the Main Process and the Worker during execution. The Main Process might
start, stop or pause the Worker thread during execution and the Worker might
send progress messages to the Main Process.
An Advanced Thread system is a collection of Messaged threads (sometimes
known as a Thread Pool) that is used to manage multiple simultaneous long duration
processes.