Skip to main content

SynchronizationContext, a multithreaded UI best friend

Of course we are all waiting for the new async features in C# 5 as announced by Anders Hejlsberg at PDC 2010.(Download the Visual Studio Async CTP), implementing a set of changes to the C# language that support a new pattern for asynchronous programming. In the meanwhile we still have to do it the old fashion way by executing work on background threads and marshalling the results back to the main UI thread. One very important player in this story are the different implementations of the SynchronizationContext class.

Depending on the kind of application, different implementations are used.

  • Windows Forms: System.Windows.Forms.WindowsFormsSynchronizationContext, used by the GUI thread(s) in Windows Forms applications. Other threads in the same application may use different SynchronizationContext implementations.
  • Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight: System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherSynchronizationContext, used by the GUI thread(s) in Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight applications. Other threads in the same application may use different SynchronizationContext implementations.
  • ASP.NET: System.Web.AspNetSynchronizationContext, used by threads running in an application hosted by the ASP.NET runtime.
  • Other: System.Threading.SynchronizationContext. Used by ThreadPool and Thread class threads, Windows Services, and Console applications, unless that thread replaces the default with a different SynchronizationContext
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Cleaner switch expressions with pattern matching in C#

Ever find yourself mapping multiple string values to the same result? Being a C# developer for a long time, I sometimes forget that the C# has evolved so I still dare to chain case labels or reach for a dictionary. Of course with pattern matching this is no longer necessary. With pattern matching, you can express things inline, declaratively, and with zero repetition. A small example I was working on a small script that should invoke different actions depending on the environment. As our developers were using different variations for the same environment e.g.  "tst" alongside "test" , "prd" alongside "prod" .  We asked to streamline this a long time ago, but as these things happen, we still see variations in the wild. This brought me to the following code that is a perfect example for pattern matching: The or keyword here is a logical pattern combinator , not a boolean operator. It matches if either of the specified pattern...
Read more