Is Application.DoEvents() just for WinForms?

c# .net winforms doevents
Jaime Oro picture Jaime Oro · Feb 12, 2011 · Viewed 18.1k times · Source

Is Application.DoEvents() just for forms?

I thought that this command was used to ensure that all of the commands before are processed but now after reading the documentation, I'm not sure anymore.

Answer

Jon Skeet picture Jon Skeet · Feb 12, 2011

Yes, it's really aimed at Windows Forms. However, in my view it should be avoided where possible.

It's usually used as a hack by developers who don't want to be bothered with putting long-running operations on a different thread... but that means they're introducing re-entrancy issues which can be very hard to track down, as well as still blocking the UI thread for some of the time (and if that includes something like a file operation, you can't really predict whether the operation will complete quickly enough to not have a user visible effect).

Related questions

Waiting for a long process and still updating UI

I've been attempting to create a task that writes to a database without blocking the UI thread. The biggest problem I'm having is waiting for that process to finish without the blocking happening. I've been trying to avoid using DoEvents (…

Read More
How do I make a textbox that only accepts numbers?

I have a windows forms app with a textbox control that I want to only accept integer values. In the past I've done this kind of validation by overloading the KeyPress event and just removing characters which didn't fit the …

Read More
How do I update the GUI from another thread?

Which is the simplest way to update a Label from another Thread? I have a Form running on thread1, and from that I'm starting another thread (thread2). While thread2 is processing some files I would like to update a Label …

Read More