How to start/stop a monitoring Delphi thread on demand?

Question

I\'ve been looking for a way to monitor for specific registry changes in Delphi. Found a solution at about.com:

procedure TRegMonitorThread.Execute;
begin
           


        

Answer 1

Instead in INFINITE you should have WaitForSingleObject time out after a period. That way the loop continues and Terminated is checked.

procedure TRegMonitorThread.Execute;
begin
  InitThread; // method omitted here
  while not Terminated do
  begin
    if WaitForSingleObject(FEvent, 1000) = WAIT_OBJECT_0 then
    begin
      fChangeData.RootKey := RootKey;
      fChangeData.Key := Key;
      SendMessage(Wnd, WM_REGCHANGE, RootKey, LongInt(PChar(Key)));
      ResetEvent(FEvent);

      RegNotifyChangeKeyValue(FReg.CurrentKey, 1, Filter, FEvent, 1);
    end;
  end;
end;

The methods TThread.Suspend and TThread.Resume could theoretically be used to temporary stop threads, but as Delphi 2010 now acknowledges they are not safe for use. See TThread.resume is deprecated in Delphi-2010 what should be used in place? and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms686345%28VS.85%29.aspx