Interrupt a sleeping Thread

Question

Is there a way to Interupt a sleeping thread? If I have code similar to this.

while(true){
    if(DateTime.Now.Subtract(_lastExecuteTime).TotalHours > 1)         


        

Answer 1

Instead of using Thread.Sleep use ManualResetEvent.WaitOne.

while (true) {
    if(DateTime.Now.Subtract(_lastExecuteTime).TotalHours > 1) {
        DoWork();
        _lastExecuteTime = DateTime.Now();
        continue; 
    }
    if (terminate.WaitOne(10000)) {
        break;
    }
}

Where terminate is a ManualResetEvent¹ that you can Set to request termination of the loop.

Update:

I just noticed that you said you are already using ManualResetEvent to terminate the background work (I am assuming that is in DoWork). Is there any reason why you cannot use the same MRE? If that is not possible there certainly should not be an issue using a different one.

Update 2:

Yeah, so instead of Thread.Sleep(5000) in ExecuteWorker do _shutdownEvent.WaitOne(5000) instead. It would look like the following.

private void ExecuteWorker() {
    while (true) {
        _pauseEvent.WaitOne(Timeout.Infinite);

        //This kills our process
        if (_shutdownEvent.WaitOne(0)) {
           break;
        }

        if (!_worker.IsReadyToExecute) {
            //sleep 5 seconds before checking again. If we go any longer we keep our service from shutting down when it needs to.
            _shutdownEvent.WaitOne(5000);
            continue;
        }
        DoWork();
    }
}

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¹There is also a ManualResetEventSlim class in .NET 4.0.