How do you start a new thread in .NET 1.1? Well, it's easy, you use Thread.Start. The problem is, the constructor for System.Threading.Thread takes in a parameter called ThreadStart, which is a delegate. So a typical usage is as below.
using System;
using System.Threading;
public class ThreadWork
{
public static void DoWork()
{
for(int i = 0; i<3;i++)
{
Console.WriteLine("Working thread...");
Thread.Sleep(100);
}
}
}
class ThreadTest
{
public static void Main()
{
ThreadStart myThreadDelegate = new ThreadStart(ThreadWork.DoWork);
Thread myThread = new Thread(myThreadDelegate);
myThread.Start();
for(int i = 0; i<3; i++)
{
Console.WriteLine("In main.");
Thread.Sleep(100);
}
}
}
The problem is, the address that may hold, is of a function that takes in no parameters. That's all hunky dory, except if you need to have a mechanism to pass in your own parameters to the thread, you need to jump through a few hoops.
NO MORE in .NET 2.0, where you have a new thing called ParameterizedThreadStart. A typical usage pattern excerpt is as below.
Thread myThread;
myThread =
new System.Threading.Thread(new ParameterizedThreadStart(ThreadEntryPoint));
Transaction currentTransactionClone = Transaction.Current.Clone();
myThread.Start(currentTransactionClone);
In the above code, the ThreadEntryPoint simply looks like as shown below.
private static void ThreadEntryPoint(object transactionInstance)
{
isThreadRunning = true ;
Transaction currentTransactionClone = (Transaction)transactionInstance;
using (SqlConnection connection2 = new SqlConnection(connectionString2))
{
connection2.Open();
connection2.EnlistTransaction(currentTransactionClone);
// Do something here - this connection is manually enlisted.
currentTransactionClone.Rollback(); // ok to do
}
isThreadRunning = false ;
}
The above code is running ThreadEntryPoint in a different thread, and is able to pass in an object - that is basically a copy of a System.Transactions.Transaction. What the above code is demonstrating is the ability of being able to pass a System.Transactions.Transaction clone on a different thread - and that a cloned transaction can only be rolled back from the other thread, but not committed.
BTW, also check out the BackgroundThreadWorker
