Windows Forms Programming in C#

Multithreaded User Interfaces

Because the Designer provides so much functionality via drag and drop and the Property Browser, it won't be long before you get to the meat of your programming chores. And when that happens, you're bound to run into a task that takes long enough to annoy your users if you make them wait while it completes—for example, printing or calculating the last digit of pi.

It's especially annoying if your application freezes while an operation takes place on the UI thread, showing a blank square where the main form used to be and leaving your users time to consider your competitors. To build applications that remain responsive in the face of long-running operations, you need threads. And even though WinForms doesn't provide ...