Every good developer should understand the basics of how Threads and Processes work on the platform they are writing applications for. For us it’s the Windows operating system and using the .Net Framework it’s even easier to harness the power of Multithreading.
Good Multithreading design can vastly improve your applications user experience and I have a little example below of how Multithreading can be used within an ASP.Net 2.0 website.
Our goal here is to send a request to the server and write out 101 lines to a text file on the webserver. The WriteOutTextFile() method takes a very long time to complete as I have deliberatly made the method run slow by making the thread go to sleep for 500ms every iteration of the loop. Now say this method was used as a logging tool behind the scenes, we wouldn’t want our user waiting for the method to write out all 101 lines before the web page was returnd to them. The user doesn’t care that your logging method takes a long time they just want to see their request returned to them, this is where multithreading comes in. We open up a new web site in Visual Studio and we have a simple application as shown below:
I put one label and one button on the form and our markup looks like this:
