Chapter 14. Multithreaded User Interfaces

Winforms applications often need to start long-running operations, such as an intensive calculation or a call to a Web service. In those cases, it's important to run the operation so that you allow the application to continue to interact with the user without freezing, while still allowing the user to see the progress of the operation and even to cancel it.

Before we get started, we should mention that this chapter discusses the issues surrounding multithreaded user interfaces only. This simplifies the discussion and covers the information you'll need most of the time when handling long-running operations in a WinForms application. For more details of threading specifics in .NET ”including the details of the Thread class, thread pooling, locking, synchronization, race conditions, and deadlocks ”you should turn to your favorite low-level .NET book.