Run a thread from UI thread without blocking UI thread

Question

I have a boolean property in my viewmodel that binds to a property in my view. When this property changes to true I would like to make a service call without blocking the UI thread, so my view can carry on working. So far I have:

    private bool _isLoadingAnimationVisible = true;
    public bool IsLoadingAnimationVisible
    {
        get { return _isLoadingAnimationVisible; }
        set
        {
            _isLoadingAnimationVisible = value;
            if (IsLoadingAnimationVisible)
            {
                Task t = new Task(() => { LoadStuff(SelectedSomething.Id, SelectedDate, false); });
                t.Start();
            }
            RaisePropertyChanged("IsLoadingAnimationVisible");
        }
    }

I don't think the method LoadStuff is important but this task t is currently blocking my UI thread. I was wondering whether there was a way to execute thread t while keeping the UI thread free.

Answer 1

You can do

if (IsLoadingAnimationVisible)
{
    new Thread(delegate() {
                           LoadStuff(SelectedSomething.Id, SelectedDate, false);
                          }).Start();
}

Make sure you are not updating UI from LoadStuff .

Answer 2

Try:

await Task.Factory.StartNew<bool>(()=>{get the bool})

You need to await a task for it to be async. The factory is a clean way of doing this.