Proper way to have an endless worker thread?

Question

I have an object that requires a lot of initialization (1-2 seconds on a beefy machine). Though once it is initialized it only takes about 20 miliseconds to do a typical \"job\"

Answer 1

I've implemented a background-task queue without using any kind of while loop, or pulsing, or waiting, or, indeed, touching Thread objects at all. And it seems to work. (By which I mean it's been in production environments handling thousands of tasks a day for the last 18 months without any unexpected behavior.) It's a class with two significant properties, a Queue and a BackgroundWorker. There are three significant methods, abbreviated here:

private void BackgroundWorker_DoWork(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e)
{
   if (TaskQueue.Count > 0)
   {
      TaskQueue[0].Execute();
   }
}

private void BackgroundWorker_RunWorkerCompleted(object sender, RunWorkerCompletedEventArgs e)
{
    Task t = TaskQueue[0];

    lock (TaskQueue)
    {
        TaskQueue.Remove(t);
    }
    if (TaskQueue.Count > 0 && !BackgroundWorker.IsBusy)
    {
        BackgroundWorker.RunWorkerAsync();
    }
}

public void Enqueue(Task t)
{
   lock (TaskQueue)
   {
      TaskQueue.Add(t);
   }
   if (!BackgroundWorker.IsBusy)
   {
      BackgroundWorker.RunWorkerAsync();
   }
}

It's not that there's no waiting and pulsing. But that all happens inside the BackgroundWorker. This just wakes up whenever a task is dropped in the queue, runs until the queue is empty, and then goes back to sleep.

I am far from an expert on threading. Is there a reason to mess around with System.Threading for a problem like this if using a BackgroundWorker will do?