How do I safely populate with data and Refresh() a DataGridView in a multi-threaded application?

Question

My app has a DataGridView object and a List of type MousePos. MousePos is a custom class that holds mouse X,Y coordinates (of type "Point") and a running count of this position. I have a thread (System.Timers.Timer) that raises an event once every second, checks the mouse position, adds and/or updates the count of the mouse position on this List.

I would like to have a similar running thread (again, I think System.Timers.Timer is a good choice) which would again raise an event once a second to automatically Refresh() the DataGridView so that the user can see the data on the screen update. (like TaskManager does.)

Unfortunately, calling the DataGridView.Refresh() method results in VS2005 stopping execution and noting that I've run into a cross-threading situation.

If I'm understanding correctly, I have 3 threads now:

• Primary UI thread
• MousePos List thread (Timer)
• DataGridView Refresh thread (Timer)

To see if I could Refresh() the DataGridView on the primary thread, I added a button to the form which called DataGridView.Refresh(), but this (strangely) didn't do anything. I found a topic which seemed to indicate that if I set DataGridView.DataSource = null and back to my List, that it would refresh the datagrid. And indeed this worked, but only thru the button (which gets handled on the primary thread.)

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So this question has turned into a two-parter:

1. Is setting DataGridView.DataSource to null and back to my List an acceptable way to refresh the datagrid? (It seems inefficient to me...)
2. How do I safely do this in a multi-threaded environment?

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Here's the code I've written so far (C#/.Net 2.0)

public partial class Form1 : Form
{
    private static List<MousePos> mousePositionList = new List<MousePos>();
    private static System.Timers.Timer mouseCheck = new System.Timers.Timer(1000);
    private static System.Timers.Timer refreshWindow = new System.Timers.Timer(1000);

    public Form1()
    {
        InitializeComponent();
        mousePositionList.Add(new MousePos());  // ANSWER! Must have at least 1 entry before binding to DataSource
        dataGridView1.DataSource = mousePositionList;
        mouseCheck.Elapsed += new System.Timers.ElapsedEventHandler(mouseCheck_Elapsed);
        mouseCheck.Start();
        refreshWindow.Elapsed += new System.Timers.ElapsedEventHandler(refreshWindow_Elapsed);
        refreshWindow.Start();
    }

    public void mouseCheck_Elapsed(object source, EventArgs e)
    {
        Point mPnt = Control.MousePosition;
        MousePos mPos = mousePositionList.Find(ByPoint(mPnt));
        if (mPos == null) { mousePositionList.Add(new MousePos(mPnt)); }
        else { mPos.Count++; }
    }

    public void refreshWindow_Elapsed(object source, EventArgs e)
    {
        //dataGridView1.DataSource = null;               // Old way
        //dataGridView1.DataSource = mousePositionList;  // Old way
        dataGridView1.Invalidate();                      // <= ANSWER!!
    }

    private static Predicate<MousePos> ByPoint(Point pnt)
    {
        return delegate(MousePos mPos) { return (mPos.Pnt == pnt); };
    }
}

public class MousePos
{
    private Point position = new Point();
    private int count = 1;

    public Point Pnt { get { return position; } }
    public int X { get { return position.X; } set { position.X = value; } }
    public int Y { get { return position.Y; } set { position.Y = value; } }
    public int Count { get { return count; } set { count = value; } }

    public MousePos() { }
    public MousePos(Point mouse) { position = mouse; }
}

Answer 1

You have to update the grid on the main UI thread, like all the other controls. See control.Invoke or Control.BeginInvoke.