Update UI from multiple worker threads (.NET)

Question

I have a pet project that I\'m working on that has multiple worker threads. Outputting everything to the console is getting hard to follow, so I want to develop a UI that wi

Answer 1

You can easily implement (2) by creating BackgroundWorker components and doing the work in their DoWork handlers:

BackgroundWorker bw = new BackgroundWorker();
bw.WorkerReportsProgress = true;
bw.DoWork += /* your background work here */;
bw.ProgressChanged += /* your UI update method here */;
bw.RunWorkerAsync();

Each BackgroundWorker can report progress to the UI thread by calling ReportProgress: although this is primarily designed for reporting progress on a bounded process, that's not mandatory -- you can pass your own custom data as well if that's what your UI update requires. You would call ReportProgress from your DoWork handler.

The nice thing about BackgroundWorker is that it takes care of a lot of messy cross-threading details for you. It also conforms to the event-driven model of updates which you (rightly) prefer to explicit callbacks.