How to prevent animation from being stoped by background worker in WPF

Question

I have a WPF aplication that is doing some serious work (doing some calcualtions) when a button is hit. I wanted to add a 'busy animation'. However, the aplication is so busy doing its work that the animation is stopped until the calcuations are finished. Any ideas??

Answer 1

Are you running your "serious work" in the UI thread? If so, you need to move the work to a separate thread if you still want the UI to be updated.

Answer 2

The serious work should always be handled in a separate thread otherwise the complete user interface may be blocked. So you are unable to click anything and not even close the application.

If it is possible you should also try the make small chunks of work and give the rest of the application time to "take a breath" and not do all work at once. It's not always possible but some work can be managed that way.