Thread parameters - the .NET 2.0 way
More manageable managed multithreading
by Ravi Bhavnani, 12 Nov 2007
|
Home
All articles
|
One of the useful niblets in .NET 2.0 is the new ParameterizedThreadStart
delegate that makes it convenient to pass parameters (OK, a single parameter - but
it's an Object so you can pretty much pass anything you want!) to a thread.
ParameterizedThreadStart makes your multithreaded code more readable and
therefore easier to maintain.
In the "old" days, I had to expose an explicit property in the class that performed
a multithreaded task like so:
1 // An object that compresses the contents of a folder to
2 // a .ZIP file.
3 public class FolderCompresser
4 {
5 // The folder to be compressed to a .ZIP file
6 public string Folder {
7 get { return _folder; }
8 set { _folder = value; }
9 }
10
11 // The compress method
12 public void Compress()
13 {
14 string zipFilename = _folder + ".zip";
15 internalCompress (_folder, zipFilename);
16 }
17 }
The client code that used FolderCompresser had to explicitly set its parameter
before starting the thread:
1 // Invoke the compressor
2 FolderCompressor fc = new FolderCompressor();
3 fc.Folder = @"C:\MyFolder";
4 Thread compressThread =
5 Thread (new ThreadStart (fc.Compress));
6 compressThread.Start();
ParameterizedThreadStart lets you specify the thread's parameter when you
start the thread, thereby allowing you to move the object's processing to a static
method, like so:
1 // An object that compresses the contents of a folder to
2 // a .ZIP file.
3 public class FolderCompresser
4 {
5 // The compress method
6 public static void Compress
7 (Object o)
8 {
9 string folder = o as string;
10 string zipFilename = folder + ".zip";
11 internalCompress (folder, zipFilename);
12 }
13 }
The client code that uses FolderCompressor is reduced to:
1 Thread compressThread =
2 new Thread (new ParameterizedThreadStart
3 (FolderCompresser.Compress));
4 compressThread.Start (@"C:\MyFolder");
And there you have it - a useful helper class to make your managed
multithreaded code more manageable.
|
