Rudolf blog of all

With a heading like this the post could be mistaken for something more philosophical but fortunately this is a plain developmental posting 🙂

Suppose you have some program that does some work and then have to ‘sleep’ for a while before doing some more work – like a service checking or polling stuff. You can simply use something like a Thread.Sleep() but that also means the thread cannot do or respond to anything else during that time – like the program or service stopping. That would mean the stopping process has to wait until the ‘sleeping’ thread becomes active again.

A solution to this is by having a variable or property that indicates if the program or service is still running and having the ‘waiting’ routine wait in little ‘jumps’ checking the ‘IsRunning’ variable each time and then waiting a little bit more until the full ‘sleeping’ period time is done.

private void BackgroundWaitIsPolling(int nextWaitInterval)
{
   int waitTimeRemaining;
   int decrementBy = 2000;
   if (IsRunning)
   {
       try
       {
           if ((nextWaitInterval <= decrementBy) && (nextWaitInterval > 0))
           {
               Thread.Sleep(nextWaitInterval);
           }
           else
           {
               waitTimeRemaining = nextWaitInterval;
               while (IsRunning && (waitTimeRemaining > 0))
               {
                  if (waitTimeRemaining <= decrementBy)
                  {
                      waitTimeRemaining = 0;
                  }
                  else
                  {
                      waitTimeRemaining -= decrementBy;
                  }
                  if (decrementBy > 0)
                  {
                      Thread.Sleep(decrementBy);
                  }
               }
           }
        }
        catch { }
   }
}