How do you handle a thread that has a hung call?

Question

I have a thread that goes out and attempts to make a connection. In the thread, I make a call to a third party library. Sometimes, this call hangs, and never returns. On

Answer 1

This function in your third-party library doesn't have a timeout or cancel function? If so, that's pretty poor design. There's not going to be any pretty solution here, methinks...

Unfortunately, there's no way you're going to get around it, short of using the Win32 API to kill the thread manually, which is certainly not going to be clean. However, if this third-party library is not giving you any other options, it may be the thing to do. The TerminateThread function is what you'll want to use, but observe the warning! To get the thread ID to pass to this function, you have to use another Win32 API call (the Thread class doesn't expose it directly). The approach here will be to set the value of a volatile class variable to the result of GetCurrentThreadId at the start of the managed thread method, and then use this thread ID later to terminate the thread.