Are the main thread and the UI thread same in C# WPF application?

Question

Can you start the UI from another thread rather than in main thread? So heavy processing in the main thread would not block the UI is that possible?

C# 4.5 WPF application

Answer 1

Yes they are the same thread. You would want to spawn off a new thread to handle major processing.

The following example simply has a button that will sleep (for 10 seconds) the main thread, once the Button_Click is called and the "sleeping" begins the whole UI becomes unresponsive.

Hope that helps.

.xaml

<Window x:Class="WpfApplication1.MainWindow"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    Title="MainWindow" Height="350" Width="525">
<Grid>
    <Button Content="Button" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="231,142,0,0" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="75" Click="Button_Click"/>

</Grid>

.cs

    using System.Threading;
using System.Windows;

namespace WpfApplication1
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Interaction logic for MainWindow.xaml
    /// </summary>
    public partial class MainWindow : Window
    {
        public MainWindow()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        private void Button_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            Thread.Sleep(10000);
        }
    }
}

Edits include grammar correction and explanation of sample/example code.