Multi-threading in an add-in?

I know VB6 prohibits it, but has anyone had any luck getting a .NET add-in to multi-thread?

My concern is to keep a GUI responsive. With VB6 this can be done using "sleep", which puts the current thread into the window/form's message loop for the set period. The closest sleep call in the .NET world literally halts a thread, which is no good.

Another way might be to force a form to empty the message queue regularly?

Richard

Richard,

Your pardon please - I don't even own VS7 - but the example here:
VB Helper: HowTo: Start multiple threads in VB.NET (http://www.vb-helper.com/howto_net_run_threads.html)
shows Thread.Sleep.

Mike Mattys

Thanks Mike, yes "Thread.Sleep" is what I was referring to as the equivalent in .NET. The problem is that this literally stops the thread for the specified period of time. I want to "process all messages", so I need a sleep that does that in the background. (VB6's sleep() does this).

Following your link led me to go back to the online MSDN docs. There I found Thread.Join which does the required message processing BUT it needs to work on a second thread. So far that isn't working for me, and if I create a second thread then I might as well run the entire dialog box in its own thread (which is what I do in standalone apps).

I'll probably give this a go next, although I know multiple threads in add-ins is prohibited in VB6 and I suspect all add-ins.

Richard

My code is a bit messy still, but it looks like multi-threading is working!!

My approach is to use asynchronous delegates, and you MUST run all MapPoint calls in the add-in's main thread. So my dialog box runs in a second thread as a modal dialog box.


Richard

I was wondering if calling an ActiveX Exe from the addin would work ...
Anywho, congrats! (what addin are you making now?)

Mike Mattys

This is continued development of MPSuperShape. I'm expanding the import options to include .SHP and .MIF files (see my other post elsewhere).

A customer sent a sample file of about 3Meg - it takes a few minutes to load, so I decided a "Working..." dialog box was required.


Richard