Can I stop System.Threading.Timer

Question

I have an application that uses timers to sometimes run monitoring tasks on secondary threads. Some of these cleaning tasks are time consuming, and I would like to be able to interrupt these tasks (elegantly, if possible) when my user finishes the program.

Is there a way to interrupt a thread programmatically, as I can, with Thread.Abort (), or do I need to add a flag to the code to indicate that the thread is complete, and check this in important places in the code that the timer starts?

Answer 1

It is not possible to know the Thread by which the Threading.Timer callback will be executed in advance. Therefore, there is no general way to interrupt it. Perhaps the callback itself reports an instance of Thread , but it opens up several race conditions

Note. In general, using Abort is bad practice. This is a fairly reliable way to find the complexity of detecting deadlocks and / or resource leaks. It is much better to use a passive mechanism like CancellationToken

Answer 2

You can stop the timer before the callback is executed using .change , but after the callback starts, you must use the application level flag so that your code can exit.

As a side note, you should not use thread.abort() if you are absolutely not 100% sure that you know the state in which it will be left. This can seriously destabilize your application in strange ways.

Answer 3

use this. Timer.Change (Timeout.Infinite, Timeout.Infinite); I have a .dispose method first, but it does not work in my case, so I use Timer.change.

this is the best solution i have found.

Answer 4

Do you mean something like that?

 using System; using System.Threading ; class AppCore : IDisposable { Timer TimerInstance ; string[] Args ; public AppCore( string[] args ) { if ( args == null ) throw new ArgumentNullException("args") ; this.TimerInstance = new Timer( Tick , null , new TimeSpan(0,0,30) , new TimeSpan(0,0,15) ) ; this.Args = args ; this.Cancelled = false ; this.Disposed = false ; return ; } public int Run() { // do something useful return 0 ; } private bool Cancelled ; public void Cancel() { lock( TimerInstance ) { Cancelled = true ; TimerInstance.Change( System.Threading.Timeout.Infinite , System.Threading.Timeout.Infinite ) ; } return ; } private void Tick( object state ) { if ( !Cancelled ) { // do something on each tick } return ; } private bool Disposed ; public void Dispose() { lock ( TimerInstance ) { if ( !Disposed ) { using ( WaitHandle handle = new EventWaitHandle( false , EventResetMode.ManualReset ) ) { TimerInstance.Dispose( handle ) ; handle.WaitOne() ; } Disposed = true ; } } return ; } } 

Answer 5

 public void stopTimer(){ myThreadingTimer = null; } 

Explication: Destroy object = destroy proccess.