Asynchronous Execution in windows forms

Question

I\'m writting a Windows Forms application in C# that executes a lot of long-running procedures on a single button click. This make the GUI to freeze till the execution. Also

Answer 1

The simplest yet efficient way to handle these scenarios, is to use a BackgroundWorker.

You put your heavy code in the DoWork event handler, and update your GUI through the ProgressChanged event handler.

You can find a tutorial here
Or even better they made a "how to" at msdn
If you have more specific questions after reading it, i'll be happy to oblige.

Answer 2

As Baboon said one way to go is Background worker approach another way if you are using .Net 4 or above could be to use Task class

Task class simplifies the execution of code on background and UI thread as needed. Using Task class you can avoid writing extra code of setting events and callbacks by using Task Continuation

Reed Copsey, Jr. has a very good series on Parallelism on .Net also take a look at it

for example a synchronous way of doing things can be

//bad way to send emails to all people in list, that will freeze your UI
foreach (String to in toList)
{
    bool hasSent = SendMail(from, "password", to, SubjectTextBox.Text, BodyTextBox.Text);
    if (hasSent)
    {
        OutPutTextBox.appendText("Sent to: " + to);
    }
    else
    {
        OutPutTextBox.appendText("Failed to: " + to);
    }
} 

//good way using Task class which won't freeze your UI
string subject = SubjectTextBox.Text;
string body = BodyTextBox.Text;
var ui = TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext();
List<Task> mails = new List<Task>();
foreach (string to in toList)
{
    string target = to;
    var t = Task.Factory.StartNew(() => SendMail(from, "password", target, subject, body))
    .ContinueWith(task =>
    {
        if (task.Result)
        {
            OutPutTextBox.appendText("Sent to: " + to); 
        }
        else
        {
             OutPutTextBox.appendText("Failed to: " + to); 
        }
     }, ui);
 }