If you develop client applications, very often you come across an operation which is taking long to complete. Basically, you have 2 options; You can either do nothing about it, let the application "freeze" and let user wait for end of the operation. The problem is that the user doesn't know what is happening so he will become frustrated ("Damn, this app is really slow...") and may even eventually kill the application from the task manager, thanks to the "feature" of Windows which will mark the window as "Not Responding" and will offer the user an option to end the process.

That is why asynchronous processing (aka. processing in background) comes in place. The idea is that you display a dialogue to the user that informs him/her that there is something going on and that it may take some time to complete; or you can even let the user work with the application and literally do all the processing in the background.

Read more »

As the number of people in our team increases, it becomes harder and harder to share the knowledge amongst the team members, which is why I decided to create this site. The blog should be mainly focused on interesting features or problems with current and future technologies, such as Microsoft .NET or Microsoft Office Suite.

Hopefully this site will become valuable source of information not just for the Memos team, but also for other developers, and will help to reduce the development time, either by offering solutions or guidelines to solve particular problems.

LukeN 080608