防止在处理过程中暂停WinForms PictureBox动画GIF？

Question

I have a form with 2 controls on it. Control 1 has several search criteria and the user can click a button to start the search. Control 2 has a GridView that will display the search results and also has a PictureBox with an animated Gif in it.

Control 1 has a method in it that has a nested foreach loop that takes upwards of 5 minutes to complete (depends upon the search criteria, sometimes it finishes almost instantly).

What happens is that I call a method on Control 2 that makes the PictureBox visible and the animated Gif starts running. As soon as the foreach loop is hit that takes a while, the image completely stops. Whenever I show any MessageBoxes the image starts running again (I presume it is because the MessageBox is blocking). As soon as the MessageBox is closed, the image stops animating.

I presume I will need to utilize something with threading, but everything I am trying (ImageAnimator, Thread calling a method that calls Invoke, etc.) all seem to not work. Any hints what events/libraries I need to work with in order to make this work? Any good examples to follow?

Answer 1

You long running code runs in the GUI-Thread and blocks the internal message loop, so any GUI is stopping. Try to run your long running code in a separate worker thread.

Answer 2

2 words: BackgroundWorker class. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/waw3xexc.aspx