Spawn Multiple Threads for work then wait until all finished

Question

just want some advice on \"best practice\" regarding multi-threading tasks.

as an example, we have a C# application that upon startup reads data from various \"type

Answer 1

If you're not on .NET 4.0 then you can use a List, one for each thread and Wait for them to be Set. To wait on multiple threads you could consider using WaitAll but watch out for the limit of 64 wait handles. If you need more than this, you can just loop over them and wait for each one individually.

If you want a faster startup exprience, you probably don't need to wait for all the data to be read during startup. Just display the GUI and any information that is missing can be shown greyed out with some sort of "Updating..." icon or similar. When the information comes in, just fire an event to update the GUI. There could be many operations that the user can begin to perform even before all the data from all tables is read in.