Lesson 4 - Daemons, ThreadPool, and asynchronous delegates in C# .NET

In the previous lesson, Monitors, thread priority, exceptions and more in C# .NET, we mentioned other topics related to threads. These included monitors, priorities, and exceptions. In today's C# .NET tutorial, we're going to learn to use ThreadPool to make our applications more efficient. We'll also learn to work with asynchronous delegates which will simplify our applications significantly.

Background Threads (Daemons)

A thread can run in the background. Although it may look that such a thread has a lower priority than a regular foreground thread, it's not like that. The background thread behaves like the thread in the foreground, except for what happens when we exit the application. If there are other threads running in the foreground besides the main thread, the process will not terminate until all the threads finish their job. If the main thread finishes and some background threads are running, these threads are automatically terminated no matter what job they have been doing.

So a background thread is like a worker thread doing some job for the main thread, and once the main thread terminates, it makes no sense for the worker thread to continue running. These threads are sometimes called daemons.

We create background threads simply by setting the

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In this tutorial, we'll learn how to run threads in the background and use ThreadPool by QueueUserWorkItem() and asynchronous delegates with a callback.

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