My Timer event crashes because the events are call

Question

I get the error "Cross-thread operation not valid: Control 'label1' accessed from a thread other than the thread it was created on." when I run this code:

using System;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Data;
using System.Text;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using System.Timers;

namespace WindowsFormsApplication1
{
    public partial class Form1 : Form
    {
        System.Timers.Timer T = new System.Timers.Timer();
        public Form1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
            T.Elapsed += new ElapsedEventHandler(T_Elapsed);
            T.Start();
        }

        void T_Elapsed(object sender, ElapsedEventArgs e)
        {
            label1.Text = "This will not work";
        }
    }
}

I thought events ran in the same thread as they were triggered in.

Answer 1

I am not a winform developer. But i heard something regararding Timer class which you are using. I think you might want to set these properties and check.

T.Interval = 5000; //in Mili Seconds
T.Enabled = true;

Answer 2

You might be using the wrong kind of timer. Try the WinForms timer, its runs on the GUI thread so you don't have to do Invoke

Answer 3

I'm assuming you're talking about a WinForms application.

When trying to update a Form element (which lives on the UI thread) from another thread, you need to use Control.Invoke or Control.BeginInvoke. You pass a delegate to the method you want to invoke (or pass an anonymous method in) and then that delegate gets called on the UI thread rather than the calling thread.

Answer 4

If you're doing this asynchronously (it sounds like you are), be sure that you catch exceptions in the event handler or callback. If a background thread throws an exception, it will crash the app. This is the most common cause that I've seen of this behavior.

Answer 5

We have 3 Timer classes in NET (Timers.Timer, Threading.Timer and Windows.Forms.Timer) but only the Windows.Forms one has a Tick event.

When used normally (ie dragged to the Form in Design-Time or created in some Form Code) the event is running on the Main thread and your problem should not occur.

It is therefore most likely that you create the Timer object in another thread, you should probably Edit your question to show us how/where you create it and tell us if it is on another Thread on purpose.

Answer 6

While the "Accepted" answer is technically correct (in that this will fix the problem) this doesn't answer the question.

The ANSWER is to use

void T_Elapsed(object sender, ElapsedEventArgs e)
{
    this.BeginInvoke(new MethodInvoker(delegate(){
        label1.Text = "This will work";
    }));
}

http://jaysonknight.com/blog/archive/2007/02/14/using-anonymous-methods-for-control-invoke-control-begininvoke.aspx