Wait one second in running program

Question

Is it pausing, but you don't see your red color appear in the cell? Try this:

dataGridView1.Rows[x1].Cells[y1].Style.BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Red;
dataGridView1.Refresh();
System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(1000);

Personally I think Thread.Sleep is a poor implementation. It locks the UI etc. I personally like timer implementations since it waits then fires.

Usage: DelayFactory.DelayAction(500, new Action(() => { this.RunAction(); }));

//Note Forms.Timer and Timer() have similar implementations. 

public static void DelayAction(int millisecond, Action action)
{
    var timer = new DispatcherTimer();
    timer.Tick += delegate

    {
        action.Invoke();
        timer.Stop();
    };

    timer.Interval = TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(millisecond);
    timer.Start();
}

Wait function using timers, no UI locks.

public void wait(int milliseconds)
{
    var timer1 = new System.Windows.Forms.Timer();
    if (milliseconds == 0 || milliseconds < 0) return;

    // Console.WriteLine("start wait timer");
    timer1.Interval = milliseconds;
    timer1.Enabled  = true;
    timer1.Start();

    timer1.Tick += (s, e) =>
    {
        timer1.Enabled = false;
        timer1.Stop();
        // Console.WriteLine("stop wait timer");
    };

    while (timer1.Enabled)
    {
        Application.DoEvents();
    }
}

Usage: just placing this inside your code that needs to wait:

wait(1000); //wait one second

.Net Core seems to be missing the DispatcherTimer.

If we are OK with using an async method, Task.Delay will meet our needs. This can also be useful if you want to wait inside of a for loop for rate-limiting reasons.

public async Task DoTasks(List<Items> items)
{
    foreach (var item in items)
    {
        await Task.Delay(2 * 1000);
        DoWork(item);
    }
}

You can await the completion of this method as follows:

public async void TaskCaller(List<Item> items)
{
    await DoTasks(items);
}

The Best way to wait without freezing your main thread is using the Task.Delay function.

So your code will look like this

var t = Task.Run(async delegate
{              
    dataGridView1.Rows[x1].Cells[y1].Style.BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Red;
    dataGridView1.Refresh();
    await Task.Delay(1000);             
});

I feel like all that was wrong here was the order, Selçuklu wanted the app to wait for a second before filling in the grid, so the Sleep command should have come before the fill command.

    System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(1000);
    dataGridView1.Rows[x1].Cells[y1].Style.BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Red;

Busy waiting won't be a severe drawback if it is short. In my case there was the need to give visual feedback to the user by flashing a control (it is a chart control that can be copied to clipboard, which changes its background for some milliseconds). It works fine this way:

using System.Threading;
...
Clipboard.SetImage(bm);   // some code
distribution_chart.BackColor = Color.Gray;
Application.DoEvents();   // ensure repaint, may be not needed
Thread.Sleep(50);
distribution_chart.BackColor = Color.OldLace;
....