Funny you mention multithread and serial comm - that's exactly what I've 
been working on today in C#.  I've got tons of multithreaded apps in C++ 
for serial communication, but I wanted to use C# for my latest project 
(easier to code, launch, find helpful examples, etc...), and I found 
that the serial port class was very easy to implement vs. what I had to 
do to get multithreaded comm to work in C++.  But, just like you 
mentioned, I was tearing along making nice progress when I found that I 
couldn't exit my application because the receive thread was deadlocked 
trying to call part of my main thread as my main thread was trying to 
exit.  I found that by just using BeginInvoke to call the serial receive 
handler rather than Invoke, it fixed it, but I'm still not sure if I'm 
doing it right (never called EndInvoke) - seems to be working well 
though after about 4hrs of continuous serial comm. 

That brings up another subject : since this is a rather simple approach 
to communicating with a serial target, I am thinking that a USB 
implementation could just be a virtual comm port on the pc and a USB CDC 
(comm device class) instance on the PIC side of an application, but 
that's obviously slow and I imagine that it might break down at high 
baud rates - not to mention the headache of virtual com port management 
in Windows.  Right now, that's about my only option for C# 
implementation of a USB PIC device, and I would much rather use the HID 
class (fairly fast, built in Windows driver, no bewildering enumeration 
of comm ports).  How hard is it to use USB drivers in C#?  Anyone have 
any experience with this?  Sorry for the rambling post - it's late...

Thanks,

Tony


Gerhard Fiedler wrote:
> Just one thing: if you use multi-threaded comms, keep an eye on
> multithreaded access to GUI components. This doesn't work well, leads to
> odd failures and needs to be synchronized.
>
> Gerhard
>   
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