How to add a Timeout to Console.ReadLine()?

Question

I have a console app in which I want to give the user x seconds to respond to the prompt. If no input is made after a certain period of time, program logic should

Answer 1

EDIT: fixed the problem by having the actual work be done in a separate process and killing that process if it times out. See below for details. Whew!

Just gave this a run and it seemed to work nicely. My coworker had a version which used a Thread object, but I find the BeginInvoke() method of delegate types to be a bit more elegant.

namespace TimedReadLine
{
   public static class Console
   {
      private delegate string ReadLineInvoker();

      public static string ReadLine(int timeout)
      {
         return ReadLine(timeout, null);
      }

      public static string ReadLine(int timeout, string @default)
      {
         using (var process = new System.Diagnostics.Process
         {
            StartInfo =
            {
               FileName = "ReadLine.exe",
               RedirectStandardOutput = true,
               UseShellExecute = false
            }
         })
         {
            process.Start();

            var rli = new ReadLineInvoker(process.StandardOutput.ReadLine);
            var iar = rli.BeginInvoke(null, null);

            if (!iar.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(new System.TimeSpan(0, 0, timeout)))
            {
               process.Kill();
               return @default;
            }

            return rli.EndInvoke(iar);
         }
      }
   }
}

The ReadLine.exe project is a very simple one which has one class which looks like so:

namespace ReadLine
{
   internal static class Program
   {
      private static void Main()
      {
         System.Console.WriteLine(System.Console.ReadLine());
      }
   }
}