Lesson 9 - Timer and BackgroundWorker in C# .NET

In the previous lesson, Handling Clicks at Coordinates in C# .NET, we completed the application that rendered geometric shapes on a PictureBox. In today's C# .NET tutorial we're going to learn how to use Timer and BackgroundWorker. We'll test both controls on illustrative examples.

Form Application Loop

If you remember our console tutorials, we simply put code in a loop if we wanted to repeat it. If we wanted to countdown 10 seconds, the console code would look like this:

for (int i = 10; i > 0; i--)
{
    Console.WriteLine(i);
    Thread.Sleep(1000);
}

The result:

Console application
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1

This isn't possible in Windows Forms. The above operation takes 10 seconds. When you run a similar long-running operation, the form thread is executing it and makes the entire form freeze. The application will stop responding, and after few seconds, Windows even offers to end it because it doesn't respond. This is because we've stopped the

...End of the preview...
Continue further