.NET: How to have background thread signal main thread data is available?

Question

What is the proper technique to have ThreadA signal ThreadB of some event, without having ThreadB sit blocked waiting for an e

Answer 1

If your "main" thread is the Windows message pump (GUI) thread, then you can poll using a Forms.Timer - tune the timer interval according to how quickly you need to have your GUI thread 'notice' the data from the worker thread.

Remember to synchronize access to the shared List<> if you are going to use foreach, to avoid CollectionModified exceptions.

I use this technique for all the market-data-driven GUI updates in a real-time trading application, and it works very well.