BackgroundWorker vs background Thread

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I have a stylistic question about the choice of background thread implementation I should use on a windows form app. Currently I have a BackgroundWorker on a form that has an infinite (while(true)) loop. In this loop I use WaitHandle.WaitAny to keep the thread snoozing until something of interest happens. One of the event handles I wait on is a "StopThread" event so that I can break out of the loop. This event is signaled when from my overridden Form.Dispose().

I read somewhere that BackgroundWorker is really intended for operations that you don't want to tie up the UI with and have an finite end - like downloading a file, or processing a sequence of items. In this case the "end" is unknown and only when the window is closed. Therefore would it be more appropriate for me to use a background Thread instead of BackgroundWorker for this purpose?

backgroundworker multithreading winforms .net
11 Answers

What's perplexing to me is that the visual studio designer only allows you to use BackgroundWorkers and Timers that don't actually work with the service project.

It gives you neat drag and drop controls onto your service but... don't even try deploying it. Won't work.

Services: Only use System.Timers.Timer System.Windows.Forms.Timer won't work even though it's available in the toolbox

Services: BackgroundWorkers will not work when it's running as a service Use System.Threading.ThreadPools instead or Async calls

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