C# event debounce

Question

I\'m listening to a hardware event message, but I need to debounce it to avoid too many queries.

This is an hardware event that sends the machine status and I have t

Answer 1

Recently I was doing some maintenance on an application that was targeting an older version of the .NET framework (v3.5).

I couldn't use Reactive Extensions nor Task Parallel Library, but I needed a nice, clean, consistent way of debouncing events. Here's what I came up with:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Threading;

namespace MyApplication
{
    public class Debouncer : IDisposable
    {
        readonly TimeSpan _ts;
        readonly Action _action;
        readonly HashSet _resets = new HashSet();
        readonly object _mutex = new object();

        public Debouncer(TimeSpan timespan, Action action)
        {
            _ts = timespan;
            _action = action;
        }

        public void Invoke()
        {
            var thisReset = new ManualResetEvent(false);

            lock (_mutex)
            {
                while (_resets.Count > 0)
                {
                    var otherReset = _resets.First();
                    _resets.Remove(otherReset);
                    otherReset.Set();
                }

                _resets.Add(thisReset);
            }

            ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(_ =>
            {
                try
                {
                    if (!thisReset.WaitOne(_ts))
                    {
                        _action();
                    }
                }
                finally
                {
                    lock (_mutex)
                    {
                        using (thisReset)
                            _resets.Remove(thisReset);
                    }
                }
            });
        }

        public void Dispose()
        {
            lock (_mutex)
            {
                while (_resets.Count > 0)
                {
                    var reset = _resets.First();
                    _resets.Remove(reset);
                    reset.Set();
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Here's an example of using it in a windows form that has a search text box:

public partial class Example : Form 
{
    private readonly Debouncer _searchDebouncer;

    public Example()
    {
        InitializeComponent();
        _searchDebouncer = new Debouncer(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(.75), Search);
        txtSearchText.TextChanged += txtSearchText_TextChanged;
    }

    private void txtSearchText_TextChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        _searchDebouncer.Invoke();
    }

    private void Search()
    {
        if (InvokeRequired)
        {
            Invoke((Action)Search);
            return;
        }

        if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(txtSearchText.Text))
        {
            // Search here
        }
    }
}