C# cancelling DoWork of background worker

Question

C# 2008

I am using the code below to login to a softphone. However, the login progess is a long process as there are many things that have to be initialized and checks t

Answer 1

There is maybe only one problem: if one of the operation in DoWork event handler would last for a long time. In this case you could abort your pending operation ONLY after that operation finished. If all operations in DoWork event can't last very long (for instance, no more than 5 seconds), its all OK, but if one of the operations can last for long time (5 minutes, for instance) in this case user have to wait until this operation finished.

If DoWork contains long lasting operations you can use something like AbortableBackgroundWorker. Something like this:

public class AbortableBackgroundWorker : BackgroundWorker
{
    private Thread workerThread;

    protected override void OnDoWork(DoWorkEventArgs e)
    {
        workerThread = Thread.CurrentThread;
        try
        {
            base.OnDoWork(e);
        }
        catch (ThreadAbortException)
        {
            e.Cancel = true; //We must set Cancel property to true!
            Thread.ResetAbort(); //Prevents ThreadAbortException propagation
        }
    }


    public void Abort()
    {
        if (workerThread != null)
        {
            workerThread.Abort();
            workerThread = null;
        }
    }
}

In this case you can truly abort pending operations, but you also have some restrictions (for more information about aborting managed thread and some restrictions see Plumbing the Depths of the ThreadAbortException Using Rotor).

P.S. I agree with Oliver that you should wrap InvokeRequired in more usable form.