Last update: 08 outubro, 2006 15:37:59

About our multi-thread development

We are having a few problems to make our users understand how our controls work

Many users have reported problems to understand why the functions available on the controls return immediately while the execution have not finished yet

People that is working with VB5 and VB6 for many years don't know that VB has only one thread , so , each task need to finish the execution or the function will not return

But in a multi-thread environment it is totally different , and this is the way that all our controls work , in a fully multi-thread environment

In order to explain we need to show how a multi-thread execution occurs

All our controls are multi-thread , this mean that the hard work is done using a different created thread and not the thread that was used to initiate the process

The multi-thread process is a little difficult to master , but it is essential to a very responsive application

It is using a thread created , and that is running concurrently with the process

The function return immediatelly because the initial thread is free to execute other tasks while the additional functions are running in the background

Then when the execution of the task running in the background is finished , an event ( Finished ) will be raised , informing that the execution terminated and the control is ready to execute another task

So , in order to know whether the execution has terminated you need to work with the Finished event in order to do a sequence of execution

Without inserting code in the Finished event it will be a little difficult to execute tasks in sequence since you will not know about the end of the execution

To avoid the problem to people that are new to the multi-thread code execution , we are inserting new code in our controls that will make the functions to return only when the task is finished

Then you don't need to interact with the Finished event in order to know about the end of execution

As soon the function return you know that the task is finished

It is an optional item on the controls , since we recommend the user to learn how to use the Finished event in order to interact with the controls

And it will not lock your application while the program is running , since it is being generated in such a way to permit interactions like , pause , resume , and cancel execution while the function have not finished yet

We hope it to fix the problems reported by some users to interact with our controls

In case of doubt just send email asking for more description of the multi-thread environment of our software

Thanks for using our software