Making threadsafe calls : C# 2005

Hi guys,

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I occasionally forget (well more often than not I cheat and ignore the
errors) to make threadsafe calls to form controls.  A good example I am
facing now - I have an object ('Instrument') that is handling messages
from a connected actual hardware instrument by way of a TCP Socket
connection.  This Instrument object raises many events so that a
subscribing form containing an object instance can provide feedback to
the user.

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So I have reviewed the 'How to make thread safe calls to Windows Form
Controls' topic in MSDN and I am puzzled by the example (or I just don't
understand it well).  The topic offers a code sample (shown below)...

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// This event handler creates a thread that calls a=20

// Windows Forms control in a thread-safe way.

private void setTextSafeBtn_Click(

    object sender,=20

    EventArgs e)

{

    this.demoThread =3D=20

        new Thread(new ThreadStart(this.ThreadProcSafe));

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    this.demoThread.Start();

}

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// This method is executed on the worker thread and makes

// a thread-safe call on the TextBox control.

private void ThreadProcSafe()

{

    this.SetText("This text was set safely.");

}

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It seems that to implement this type of thread-safe calling will require
a whole lot of code (it seems that I will need such a 'setup' for
modifying each and every form control I want to modify.

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Maybe a more concrete example of what I'm talking about would be useful.
My Instrument object raises among other events a 'DataReceived() event'
which the form has a handler for.  When this event is handled by the
form, it updates several controls on the form.  So I can see how I would
create a 'demoThread' in the event handler that calls a separate method
(similar to 'ThreadProcSafe' in the example above) but it seems that I'd
have to call several different 'ThreadProcSafe' methods to handle all
the controls updating I require.  I guess I could have the newly created
friend call a method called UpdateFormControls (that updates every
control on the form whether its needed or not) but that seems like a
not-too-good way to do the updating.

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Surely I'm missing something.  Any comments?

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Sincerely,

peter

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