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Can anybody please explain this statement written on this link
Invoke(Delegate): Executes the specified delegate on the thread that owns the control's underlying window handle.
Can anybody explain what this means (especially the bold one) I am not able to get it clearly
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A delegate instance encapsulates an invocation list, which is a list of one or more methods, each of which is referred to as a callable entity. For instance methods, a callable entity consists of an instance and a method on that instance. For static methods, a callable entity consists of just a method.
Once a delegate is instantiated, a method call made to the delegate is pass by the delegate to that method. The parameters passed to the delegate by the caller are passed to the method, and the return value, if any, from the method, is returned to the caller by the delegate. This is known as invoking the delegate.
Delegates can be invoke like a normal function or Invoke() method. Multiple methods can be assigned to the delegate using "+" or "+=" operator and removed using "-" or "-=" operator. It is called multicast delegate. If a multicast delegate returns a value then it returns the value from the last assigned target method.
The Invoke method searches up the control's parent chain until it finds a control or form that has a window handle if the current control's underlying window handle does not exist yet. If no appropriate handle can be found, the Invoke method will throw an exception.
The answer to this question lies in how C# Controls work
Controls in Windows Forms are bound to a specific thread and are not thread safe. Therefore, if you are calling a control's method from a different thread, you must use one of the control's invoke methods to marshal the call to the proper thread. This property can be used to determine if you must call an invoke method, which can be useful if you do not know what thread owns a control.
From Control.InvokeRequired
Effectively, what Invoke does is ensure that the code you are calling occurs on the thread that the control "lives on" effectively preventing cross threaded exceptions.
From a historical perspective, in .Net 1.1, this was actually allowed. What it meant is that you could try and execute code on the "GUI" thread from any background thread and this would mostly work. Sometimes it would just cause your app to exit because you were effectively interrupting the GUI thread while it was doing something else. This is the Cross Threaded Exception - imagine trying to update a TextBox while the GUI is painting something else.
Effectively, you are interrupting a queue, which can have lots of unforeseen consequences. Invoke is effectively the "polite" way of getting what you want to do into that queue, and this rule was enforced from .Net 2.0 onward via a thrown InvalidOperationException.
To understand what is actually going on behind the scenes, and what is meant by "GUI Thread", it's useful to understand what a Message Pump or Message Loop is.
This is actually already answered in the question "What is a Message Pump" and is recommended reading for understanding the actual mechanism that you are tying into when interacting with controls.
Other reading you may find useful includes:
What's up with Begin Invoke
One of the cardinal rules of Windows GUI programming is that only the thread that created a control can access and/or modify its contents (except for a few documented exceptions). Try doing it from any other thread and you'll get unpredictable behavior ranging from deadlock, to exceptions to a half updated UI. The right way then to update a control from another thread is to post an appropriate message to the application message queue. When the message pump gets around to executing that message, the control will get updated, on the same thread that created it (remember, the message pump runs on the main thread).
and, for a more code heavy overview with a representative sample:
Invalid Cross-thread Operations
// the canonical form (C# consumer) public delegate void ControlStringConsumer(Control control, string text); // defines a delegate type public void SetText(Control control, string text) { if (control.InvokeRequired) { control.Invoke(new ControlStringConsumer(SetText), new object[]{control, text}); // invoking itself } else { control.Text=text; // the "functional part", executing only on the main thread } } Once you have an appreciation for InvokeRequired, you may wish to consider using an extension method for wrapping these calls up. This is ably covered in the Stack Overflow question Cleaning Up Code Littered with Invoke Required.
There is also a further write up of what happened historically that may be of interest.
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A control or window object in Windows Forms is just a wrapper around a Win32 window identified by a handle (sometimes called HWND). Most things you do with the control will eventually result in a Win32 API call that uses this handle. The handle is owned by the thread that created it (typically the main thread), and shouldn't be manipulated by another thread. If for some reason you need to do something with the control from another thread, you can use Invoke to ask the main thread to do it on your behalf.
For instance, if you want to change the text of a label from a worker thread, you can do something like this:
theLabel.Invoke(new Action(() => theLabel.Text = "hello world from worker thread!")); If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
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