Synchronous work in a BackgroundWorker

Question

My application performs time consuming work independently on several files. I created a BackgroundWorker to pass the work off to on each file, but it appears the backgroundworker is only capable of performing asynchronous work. Is it possible to do several asynchronous tasks in unison with it, or is there a similar object for performing synchronous operations?

Answer 1

While you can use the BackgroundWorker, I think you should simply spin off a few threads to do the work. One thread (probably the main thread) will create and start these worker threads and then perform a Join on all the workers in order to wait for processing to complete.

Alternatively, have a look a the Parallel Extensions for .Net if you are using .Net 3.5. The Task object from that library is probably perfect for your situation.

Answer 2

The background worker is usually used to update the UI and/or to pass off work so you don't freeze the UI when a long running process takes place. This means that you "pass" the background worker process the "file work" and then use a callback to update the UI(usually) all during which your APP remains responsive.

If the items are independent then you might want to spool up a few threads to split the work. Again, if I am understanding you correctly. If I am then you might want to look at Jon Skeet's threading article.

Answer 3

You can do multiple aynchronous tasks by creating more then one BackgroundWorker object in your code. We created a JobPool class that created a number of BackgroundWorker objects to run so that we could control the total number running at any one time. But if there are just a few files you will be processing this wouldbe overkill.