Alternatives to Thread.Sleep() for simulating pauses

Question

So Thread.Sleep() is bad (http://msmvps.com/blogs/peterritchie/archive/2007/04/26/thread-sleep-is-a-sign-of-a-poorly-designed-program.aspx).

Is there any recommended alternative to simulating a pause in execution of a program? Eg a loop? Although I suppose this involves a lot of overhead in initialising variables, checking the bool condition, etc.

Thanks

Answer 1

If you are only going to simulate a pause (as in for test purposes), I think Thread.Sleep is a perfectly valid approach. On the other hand, if you are actually waiting for something, some sort of thread-safe signalling mechanism would be better (check the types that inherits WaitHandle).

Answer 2

simulating a pause

"Simulating" sounds like something you would only do in debugging. Thread.Sleep should be fine.

The main problem with Sleep is that usually you should be waiting for something specific to occur rather than waiting for an arbitrary delay.

The other thing to watch out for is calling Thread.Sleep from a UI thread, which will make the UI unresponsive. Better to disable the parts of the UI that you do not want the user to interact with and then use a Timer control to implement the delay.