When you use Dispatcher.BeginInvoke it means that it schedules the given action for execution in the UI thread at a later point in time, and then returns control to allow the current thread to continue executing. Invoke blocks the caller until the scheduled action finishes. When you use BeginInvoke your loop is going to run … Read more
The Control.Begin/End/Invoke() and Dispatcher.Begin/End/Invoke() methods have identical names and somewhat similar behavior to a delegate’s Begin/End/Invoke() methods but it is certainly best to scrap the idea that they are the same. The most important difference is that a delegate’s methods are type-safe, something that’s completely missing from the Control and Dispatcher versions. Runtime behavior is … Read more
From the MSDN article ‘Calling Synchronous Methods Asynchronously’: No matter which technique you use, always call EndInvoke to complete your asynchronous call. Now, there is theory and then there is practice. You have found, like many other developers before you, that you can often get away with ignoring this documented requirement. It may be an … Read more
It seems to me that you are operating on at least one false assumption. 1. You don’t need to raise the ProgressChanged event to have a responsive UI In your question you say this: BackgroundWorker is not the answer because it may be that I don’t get the progress notification, which means there would be … Read more
You can use Dispatcher even in a WinForms app. If you are sure to be on a UI thread (e.g. in an button.Click handler), Dispatcher.CurrentDispatcher gives you the UI thread dispatcher that you can later use to dispatch from background threads to the UI thread as usual.
Do you mean Delegate.Invoke/BeginInvoke or Control.Invoke/BeginInvoke? Delegate.Invoke: Executes synchronously, on the same thread. Delegate.BeginInvoke: Executes asynchronously, on a threadpool thread. Control.Invoke: Executes on the UI thread, but calling thread waits for completion before continuing. Control.BeginInvoke: Executes on the UI thread, and calling thread doesn’t wait for completion. Tim’s answer mentions when you might want to … Read more