Difference in BackgroundWorker thread access in VS2010 / .NET 4.0?
- by Jonners
Here's an interesting one - in VS2005 / VS2008 running against .NET 2.0 / .NET 3.0 / .NET 3.5, a BackgroundWorker thread may not directly update controls on a WinForms form that initiated that thread - you'll get a System.InvalidOperationException out of the BackgroundWorker stating "Cross-thread operation not valid: Control 'thecontrol' accessed from a thread other than the thread it was created on". I remember hitting this back in 2004 or so when I first started writing .NET WinForms apps with background threads. There are several ways around the problem - this is not a question asking for that answer.
I've been told recently that this kind of operation is now allowed when written in VS2010 / .NET 4.0. This seems unlikely to me, since this kind of object access restriction has always been a fairly fundamental part of thread-safe programming. Allowing a BackgroundWorker thread direct access to objects owned not by itself but by its parent UI form seems contrary to that principle. A trawl through the .NET 4.0 docs hasn't revealed any obvious changes that could account for this behaviour.
I don't have VS2010 / .NET 4.0 to test this out - does anyone who has access to that toolset know for sure whether the model has changed to allow that kind of thread interaction? I'd like to either take advantage of it in future, or deploy the cluestick. ;)
