Multithreaded service, BackgroundWorker vs ThreadPool?

Question

I have a .NET 3.5 Windows Service. I\'m testing with a small application that just sleeps threads after starting them, for random timespans of 300 to 6500ms. I have various

Answer 1

I wrote up a fairly exhaustive overview of various implementations of asynchronous background tasks on my blog. The summary is: prefer Task; the second choice would be BackgroundWorker; and only use Thread or ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem if you really need to.

Reasons: it's easier to detect and recover from errors, and it's easier to synchronize back to a UI.

To answer your specific questions:

BackgroundWorker works in any host, including WinForms and WPF (and even ASP.NET!), because it is based on SynchronizationContext. Windows services do not have a SynchronizationContext, but you can use ActionThread from the Nito.Async library, which comes with a SynchronizationContext.

If I read your question correctly, you currently have Threads and are considering ThreadPool and BackgroundWorker. Of those choices, I recommend BackgroundWorker, but if you have the chance, use the new Task class in .NET 4.0 (if you install Microsoft Rx, you can also use Task in .NET 3.5).