How to make the cleanest code when reporting progress to a user?

Question

I've struggled for the last couple of months to come up with some clean code to report progress to a user. Everything always seems to boil down to:

ReportProgress("Starting Task 1");
doTask1();
ReportProgress("Task 1 is done");

ReportProgress("Starting Task 2");
doTask2();
ReportProgress("Task 2 is done");

//etc... where report progress does some form of output to the user.

The good coder in me screams "There's got to be a cleaner way!" But I'm stumped. Any thoughts?

EDIT :: I'm looking more for information on architectural information as opposed to implementation specific. The code given is very oversimplified.

Answer 1

set up your tasks as an event stream, and have the event-processing 'engine' report progress. Each event instance can have its own name, progress-reporting blurb/template, etc. if you want to go that far

if this is a pattern that occurs often, it is worth the effort for the infrastructure. When you're done, the usable code might look something like:

EventQueue tasks = new EventQueue();
tasks.Add(new TaskEvent(this.doTask1,"Foo-ing the bar"));
tasks.Add(new TaskEvent(this.doTask2,"Bar-ing the foo"));
tasks.Add(new TaskEvent(this.doTask3,"Glitching and whinging"));
...
tasks.Execute(this.ProgressEventHandler);