Don’t use a dedicated thread to wait on a kernel object

One of the code patterns in the previous post showed that you don’t need a dedicated thread to execute a piece of code at regular intervals.

Likewise you don’t need a dedicated thread to wait on a kernel object (such as a mutex or an event). You can use the threadpool to do this:

   1: class Test

   2: {

   3:   // This method returns an event. Whenever the event will be set (by the caller of this 

   4:   // method), the 'EventWasSet' method will be executed.

   5:   public WaitHandle GetEvent()

   6:   {

   7:     AutoResetEvent m_Event = new AutoResetEvent(false);

   8:     ThreadPool.RegisterWaitForSingleObject(m_Event, EventWasSet, null, Timeout.Infinite,false);

   9:     return m_Event;

  10:   }

  11:  

  12:   void EventWasSet(object state, bool timeOut)

  13:   {

  14:     // This code will be executed on the threadpool when the event is set

  15:   }

  16: }

The RegisterWaitForSingleObject() method makes sure that the given method will be executed on a threadpool thread when the kernel object is signaled.