waiting but still recieving messages....is there a way?

[nick158]

I only started coding c# a week ago, and I’m a little stuck! I'm making an application where the user has 1 second to click the mouse button once they see movement on the screen. My problem is: what is the best way of waiting until the mouse button has been pressed without hogging the system resources? If I use a sleep then the onclick method for the mouse click won’t be called until the sleep has finished I assume? I need the time at which the mouse button was pressed, therefore sleeping for 1 second and then seeing if the mouse was pressed isn't good enough. Currently the application was coded by someone else, and it uses a while loop until the time equals 1 second later. Obviously this allows the application to receive messages and make the onclick method call occur but it also uses all the processing resources. Further to this, is there a way of getting a time stamp of when a message occurred? This would be more accurate than getting the time once the on click method has been called. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated! Nick

[Robin Panther]

If I've understood you correctly, then I suggest you something like this: remember when timer was started in absolute values. use another thread loop with Join(interval) method, where interval = precision of time measurements, that you need. You can use timer component in the form to implement this simply. On each timer tick - check, is it second already. onClick event must first remember what time is now, in absolute values, stop timer, then calculate difference between start and stop time. Should work. Robin Panther

[nick158]

Thanks Robin, I was thinking of something like that, I just wasn't sure if there was something similar to the sleep method which allowed messages to pass. I'll have a go at implementing it that way. Many thanks Nick

[Guffa]

Put a timer on the form that fires after a second. Then you just have to sit back and wait for events, and see if the click or tick fires first. --- b { font-weight: normal; }