Animations and blocking thread

[Corrado Cavalli]

Hi folks,

I have a waiting animation spinning and I need to invoke a blocking function, this causes animation to stop.

Apart  invoking function in a secondary thread is there any alternative solution/trick I’m not aware of?

 

Happy holidays!

-Corrado

 

 

[Shawn Wildermuth]

Nope, you block on the UI thread, animations stop (and I think videos too). Isn't that a perfect use of the ThreadPool (or background worker if you want to be able to cancel it)?

[Corrado Cavalli]

Oh yeah,

That’s probably what I’m going to do, just wanted to ask this club of gurus if i just miss something that could avoid that J

 

Thanks Shawn!

 

-Corrado

 

From: wpf-di...@googlegroups.com [mailto:wpf-di...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Shawn Wildermuth
Sent: mercoledì 23 dicembre 2009 08:27
To: wpf-di...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: [WPF Disciples] Animations and blocking thread

 

Nope, you block on the UI thread, animations stop (and I think videos too). Isn't that a perfect use of the ThreadPool (or background worker if you want to be able to cancel it)?

 

From: wpf-di...@googlegroups.com [mailto:wpf-di...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Corrado Cavalli
Sent: Wednesday, December 23, 2009 1:17 AM
To: wpf-di...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [WPF Disciples] Animations and blocking thread

 

Hi folks,

[Sacha Barber]

Nope, threading is the way.

--
Sacha Barber
sacha....@gmail.com

[Laurent Bugnion, GalaSoft]

As others said, threading is the way. Note that some operations in the framework are already asynchronous (such as async web requests) so they are not blocking. Sometimes however I find that the mere operation of creating a web client causes some glitches in the animations, so I sometimes spin a new thread for that operation anyway.

 

Thankfully, with lambdas, threading is much less painful than it used to be… as long as everything works fine ;)

 

Cheers,

Laurent

[Eric Burke]

Even though it's more typical to do the work in the background and dispatch to the UI thread -- there are still times where that operation causes hiccups in the animation.  If that's the case, you could create that visual on a background thread, provided the thing that's animating doesn't require user input.  See Dwayne Need's article here: http://blogs.msdn.com/dwayneneed/archive/2007/04/26/multithreaded-ui-hostvisual.aspx

I have a wrapper class for this type of visual that I've used if you are interested -- ping me off list.

[Paul Stovell]

Great find Eric!

Paul

--
Paul Stovell