Correct way to close a foreground thread

Question

When closing an application, what is the best way to close foreground threads at the same time?

From all my research, it seems to be that the best way is to set IsBackground to true..

Is this correct or is there a better way? I'm skeptical as it doesn't seem to follow Microsofts normally descriptive method name pattern.

Answer 1

It will certainly work, the CLR will abort a thread like that when your main startup exits. Pretty similar to using Thread.Abort(), minus the drastic failure modes you'd normally suffer from using Abort(). It is a rude abort, there's nothing that the thread itself can do to stop it. And there will be no more code that runs afterwards that could fail due to the typical problems you'd get from Abort(), like a deadlock. Other than finalizers.

Calling it "correct" is however a bit of a stretch, there's also nothing that the thread can do to terminate cleanly. Which might be detrimental if it has externally observable behavior. Like updating a dbase, talking over a socket or writing a file. That's rudely interrupted as well, potentially leaving a confused server or a half-written file that can cause trouble later. A mitigating circumstance is that this will also happen when your program dies on an unhandled exception, you'd expect it to not cause trouble either. It depends :)