Pausing a thread until manually resumed

Question

How do I put a thread into paused/sleep state until I manually resume it in c# ?

Currently I am aborting the thread but this is not what I am looking for. The thread should sleep/pause until it something triggers it to wake up.

I've never done this before but I am thinking along the lines of blocking the thread using a ManualResetEvent. — User 12345678, Jul 04 '13 at 15:05
@ByteBlast: It does look like a duplicate, however the answer on the other question isn't particularly great :/ — Ian, Jul 04 '13 at 15:32
Make sure to do this only to a background thread. A UI thread (any thread that has joined a COM STA, usually the main thread, and generally any thread that owns a window for any reason) *must* continue to run and pump messages or it will cause stability problems. — Euro Micelli, Jul 04 '13 at 21:48

Ian · Accepted Answer · 2016-09-29T12:17:35.277

You should do this via a ManualResetEvent.

ManualResetEvent mre = new ManualResetEvent();
mre.WaitOne();  // This will wait

On another thread, obviously you'll need a reference to the ManualResetEvent instance.

mre.Set(); // Tells the other thread to go again

A full example which will print some text, wait for another thread to do something and then resume:

class Program
{
    private static ManualResetEvent mre = new ManualResetEvent(false);

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Thread t = new Thread(new ThreadStart(SleepAndSet));
        t.Start();

        Console.WriteLine("Waiting");
        mre.WaitOne();
        Console.WriteLine("Resuming");
    }

    public static void SleepAndSet()
    {
        Thread.Sleep(2000);
        mre.Set();
    }
}

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 04 '13 at 15:05

4

Look into AutoResetEvent or ManualResetEvent.

answered Jul 04 '13 at 15:05

spender

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Pausing a thread until manually resumed

2 Answers2