Is it possible to kill the BackgroundWorker's thread?

Question

Is it possible \"kill\" the thread of a BackgroundWorker?

In my DoWork event, I can\'t check the cancellation flag, because I have a blocki

Answer 1

I'm not aware of a safe way to abort a thread.

A background worker can check if it should cancel and cancel itself, but if it's off querying a database there's not much you can do until it returns.

You can do work on a ThreadPool thread and just abandon the thread and start another if it's not needed anymore (making sure that when it comes back from a db query it checks if it should cancel before doing anything nasty). Of course you'd need to balance the performance and manage thread synchronisation. If you go down that path, you could take a look at the Interlocked static class for efficient critical section locking.