Alternative to Thead.Sleep? in C#

I have another thread polling user input. This thread is the main thread and can sleep minutes at a time. If the user hits wants to quit it may be 2+ minutes before the console window shuts down which ma开发者_开发百科y feel not responsive.

How can i make this thread wake up from Thread.Sleep? Do i need to use another function to sleep and pass in a bool ref for it to check when the thread wake up and end?

Use Monitor.Wait instead, and call Monitor.Pulse or Monitor.PulseAll to wake the thread up.

The solution is "Don't sleep on your UI thread". You should have a thread waiting for user input (not polling), and if you have a thread which needs to sleep (which probably isn't the case - it sounds like a hackish workaround to a different problem), then that should be separate thread that isn't handling the interface.

Have a look at the blocking queue:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163427.aspx#S4

Couple of suggestions:

1. If your using explicit threads you can try setting ThreadType to "Background" to prevent it from blocking an exit.
2. Try this as how you block:

main thread:

AutoResetEvent waitingEvent = new AutoResetEvent(false);
bool doneFlag = false
Thread myUIInputThread = new Thread(someFunction);

myUIInputThread.Start(waitingEvent);

while (!doneFlag) {
   doneFlag = waitingEvent.WaitOne(1000);
   if (!doneFlag) {
      Console.Writeline("Still waiting for the input thread...");
   }
}

In some function:

public void someFunction(object state) {
   Console.Write ("Enter something: ");
   Console.Readline();
   //... do your work ....

   ((AutoResetEvent)state).Set();
}

• Not tested for exactness... YMMV :)