Threading with Forms

Some of our students have been having fun with threading and forms (there is a lab out there at the moment which can be solved by creating a thread which performs a task).

Threads are great, because you can send them off to do something while you get back to responding to the user, or whatever. Snag is, when another thread tries to dicker with the contents of a form this ends in tears, as the Windows system is very picky about actions like this. There is a way round the problem though, and so I've written a little sample application which shows you how to do it.

It creates a form which has a single button on it. When you press the button it creates a worker thread and fires it off in another class to do something. When the something finishes it then calls back into the form to change the text in a label on that form. You can use this as a model for whatever you fancy doing with threads. You can find the code here.