C＃并行执行多个任务

Question

I'm building an application that connects to a server, which takes a good 8 seconds to do, so I decided to launch a loading screen window in the meantime.

I want the loading screen to display a spinning wheel that spins as the application is connecting.

The problem is that when I try it out, the wheel locks and doesn't spin. The reason is that the app is busy connecting to the server, so it's keeping the wheel from spinning. As soon as the application successfully connects, the wheel starts spinning.

If I get them to run asynchronously, I'm worried that the wait time would increase. So, I'm wondering what's the most efficient way that would allow both tasks to run in parallel.

I'm using the mahapps progress ring

Answer 1

For a scenario like yours, I would highly suggest you take a look at Asynchronous programming with async and await .

Here is a good resource for that https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-guide/concepts/async/

Answer 2

Asynchronous and parallel are two different things. In this case you want to display the spinning wheel and connect to the server in parallel. This means that you will have to connect to the server on another thread than the UI thread where the spinning wheel is displayed. The UI thread cannot both update the wheel and connect to the server simultaneously.

The preferred way to write multithreaded and parallel code in .NET is to use the Task Parallel Library (TPL) . You could start a task and await it using the async / await keywords that were introduced in C#5/.NET Framework 4.5 like this:

spinningWheel.Visibility = Visibility.Visible;
await Task.Run(()=> { /* connect to the server here... */ });
spinningWheel.Visibility = Visibility.Collapsed; //the server is connected