Block function call from WndProc handler function in C#

Question

I have code in C# where Window is getting messages (images from GigE camera). In function handler I call another function to do some processing on the image I get from message. This processing can take more time than time between next message I get. I would like to use some nice mechanism to ignore messages until processing will be done. I could simply write:

bool is_processing = false;

void HandleUeyeMessage(int wParam, int lParam) 
{
   frame = getNewFrame();

   if(!is_processing) {
      doProcessing(frame);
   } else non-blocking ignore 
}

void doProcessing(frame f)
{
    is_processing = true;
    // some processing work...
    is_processing = false;
    return;
}

but I want to use some synchronization mechanism, but I don't really know what to use because this is not generally threading thing...

Answer 1

you cannot ignore messages in a single thread- they will be queued and processed when your app is able to respond. You can use worker thread with some basic synchronization.

BackgroundWorker _worker=new BackgroundWorker();

void OnMessage(int lparam, int wparam)
{
    frame frame=GetFrame();
   if(!_worker.IsBusy)
        _worker.RunWorkerAsync(frame);
}

void DoWork(object sender,DoWorkEventArgs e)
{
    //do processing
}