Window doesn't react during calculations

Question

Hello I am writing a program at the moment which is able to solve a certain set of differential equations for subsequent time steps. I would like to implement it in such a way that one can press start and it will start the calculation timestep by timestep until it reaches some max number of steps however I also want to implement a button called stop so it can stop the calculations at a time decided by the user. At the moment I don't know how to do that because during the calculations the window just doesn't react and if I try to click something it crashes (so i guess it is stuck in calculations). Is there a way to overcome this somehow? Cheers Phil

Vulpes · Answer

This sounds like a classic situation for use of the BackgroundWorker class which will perform the calculations on a background thread and keep the user interface thread responsive in the meantime. You can also cancel it by calling the CancelAsync method from your stop button's Click eventhandler. Check out the MSDN docs which have plenty of examples: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.componentmodel.backgroundworker.aspx I'd also check the articles on this site: http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/Search/?sKeywords=backgroundworker Also here's an example for WPF specifically: http://elegantcode.com/2009/07/03/wpf-multithreading-using-the-backgroundworker-and-reporting-the-progress-to-the-ui/