WPF Animated ProgressBar in WinForms application

Question

I have a WinForms application, and wanted to add some nice WPF controls, one of them being an 'indeterminate' progress bar.. which just animates nicely until I tell it to stop.

I have done this, and was racking my brains as to why it wasn't animating (changing the value of the progress bar).

I eventually tried showing my form (containing the ElementHost) modally, and hey presto, it animates, but I want to show the form non-modally, as I want to continue processing behind the scenes.

Is there some kind of setting that tells the ElementHost window to continue 'animating'?

Thanks Rich.

Answer 1

As I mention in my comment above, the solution is to run the processing in a separte thread, which allows the .net Main GUI thread do its stuff, and animate the progress bar.

Answer 2

There are many ways to do this , the simplest one is to use a backgroundworker for the lengthy task. The Backgroundworker has an event to report progress. Handle this event and in the handler change your progressbar's value. Just having an animation in the main thread while still doing work on the main thread will not work right ...
One other aproach you may try (though is not what I would recommend for a healty app) is to implement a DoEvents function and call it in the main thread when you want the progress bar to get updated ... Here is the link for the DoEvents implementation:
MSDN DoEvents sugestion
I would Strongly recommend the first approach though