How do I properly close a C# application that has created multiple threads?

Question

I am writing a GUI application.

The application is opening multiple threads during it's life time. One of the threads is handling events that can come from other applications, so it is waiting in a while(true) loop for the event which is never been terminated.

The user can close the application in any minute. I want to close all the threads that the main application had opened.

I am using Process.GetCurrentProcess().Kill(); to deal with this problem at the moment.

Is this a good solution? If not, why and what is the proper way to deal with this problem, how to close all threads that were opened by the main application?

Answer 1

If you create the new threads as background threads (by setting IsBackground before starting them), they will automatically stop when the main thread (the application thread) terminates.

(From MSDN):

A thread is either a background thread or a foreground thread. Background threads are identical to foreground threads, except that background threads do not prevent a process from terminating. Once all foreground threads belonging to a process have terminated, the common language runtime ends the process. Any remaining background threads are stopped and do not complete.

Answer 2

Once you already have threads waiting for some events, just add one more event that when triggered will instruct the thread to terminate.

In case you don't need to provide some means of graceful shutdown for other threads, you can switch them into the “background thread” mode to ensure automatic termination — see MSDN for a thorough discussion of this topic.