Why there are 5 Versions of Timer Classes in .NET?

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Here’s a description of the primary timers and the points that i find to be the most noteworthy.

Winforms.Timer

  • ticks on UI thread not guaranteed to ticket at a specific time
  • ticks delayed until UI thread is idle
  • will skip ticks if the UI thread is busy

DispatcherTimer

  • invoked on UI thread
  • can set priority for what level of ‘idle’ is required to generate a tick
  • will skip ticks

Threading.Timer

  • ticks on a worker thread from threadpool – no option for specifying thread
  • ticks are always fired on time
  • none are skipped – you must guard against new ticks while you’re still processing a former tick
  • unhandled exceptions will crash the application

Timers.Timer

  • wrapper around threading timer
  • ticks on a worker thread taken from the CLR threadpool
  • can force to tick on a specific thread by supplying a SynchronizationObject
  • ticks are always fired on time
  • none are skipped
  • silently eats exceptions

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