Threads and Timers are the most common things that you need for your application. Any work that needs to be done in background without intervening the work that is running in the foreground needed to be done using a Thread. We create Threads to delegate a long running process in background so that the UI remains unblocked. Timers on the other hand is a special module which runs after a certain interval of time in background. So you would think Timers will also create a new Thread in background and runs the module associated with it after a certain time. This is not always true.
In this post, I will compare most of the timers available with .NET right now, and later on discuss about DispatcherTimer in WPF.
Difference between Concurrency and Asynchrony?
Now if you look back when Microsoft introduced a
sync CTP in PDC 2010, or
my own article on Async, it is clearly stated that Asynchrony and Concurrency are two different concepts. Asynchrony means running a job without blocking the Thread where it is working at. Concurrency is actually a special kind of asynchrony where it is achieved by creating a new Thread. Hence you can say, all sorts of concurrency is asynchrony while all asynchrony is not concurrency. You can have asynchrony without concurrency and it is really worth doing that, as you all know it is not good to put every work in Separate thread. ThreadPools could somewhat help by allowing you to manage threads but still Threads are for long running background processes, so beware to use it only when you absolutely require it.
Going ahead with this thought, lets compare the existing Timers.There are a number of Timers available with .NET before. Many of us might not know what is the basic difference between them. Lets put a comparative analysis on them one by one.
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