C# console timer
Written by: maffelu , 2011-06-08
Why do I write this article?
Well, whenever you write an application using windows forms you gain access to the System.Windows.Forms.Timer class. That class, however, is depending on the Windows message loop which you can't access without System.Windows.Forms.
There are various articles out there (on the intarnet) on how to create a timer class for a console application, but most of them runs a standard loop with Thread.Sleep() in it. I wanted to create a timer class using the System.Threading.Timer class.
So, what do we do?
We'll create a class with two methods (Start, Stop), one event (Tick) and two properties (Period, DueTime). The Start and Stop methods are quite self-explanatory (they start and stop the timer, duh). The Tick event is an event which will be triggered on every tick (just like the WinForm timer tick event). The two properties Period and DueTime dictates the amount of time to pass between each individual tick and the time to delay the triggering of the Tick event.
CustomTimer.cs
using System;
using System.Threading;
namespace EventHandling
{
public delegate void TickDelegate();
public class CustomTimer
{
#region Events
/// <summary>
/// The tick event, will be triggered on every tick.
/// </summary>
public event TickDelegate Tick;
#endregion
#region Fields
private Timer m_Timer;
#endregion
#region Properties
/// <summary>
/// The period between the ticks
/// </summary>
public int Period { get; set; }
/// <summary>
/// The time to delay before the callback is invoked
/// </summary>
public int DueTime { get; set; }
#endregion
#region Construct
public CustomTimer() : this(0, 0) { }
public CustomTimer(int period) : this(period, 0) { }
public CustomTimer(int period, int dueTime)
{
Period = period;
DueTime = dueTime;
}
#endregion
#region Methods
protected void OnTick()
{
if (Tick != null)
{
Tick();
}
}
/// <summary>
/// Start the timer
/// </summary>
public void Start()
{
TimerCallback timerCallback = new TimerCallback(ProcessTimerCallback);
m_Timer = new Timer(
timerCallback,
null,
DueTime,
Period
);
}
/// <summary>
/// Stop the timer
/// </summary>
public void Stop()
{
if (m_Timer != null)
{
m_Timer.Dispose();
m_Timer = null;
}
}
private void ProcessTimerCallback(object o)
{
OnTick();
}
#endregion
}
}
Program.cs
using System;
using System.Threading;
namespace EventHandling
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
CustomTimer timer = new CustomTimer(500, 1000);
timer.Tick = new TickDelegate(timer_Tick);
timer.Start();
Thread.Sleep(5000);
timer.Stop();
Console.WriteLine("Timer stopped...");
Console.Read();
}
static void timer_Tick()
{
Console.WriteLine("Test!");
}
}
}
Output:
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Maffelu