Windows Phone and thread synchronization

This will be a short and technical post about a problem I just solved using information from Stack Overflow answers. Because none of those discussions is actually responding my question I will make this note about what I found.

Creating background workers and other threads may lead into a cross thread invoke errors when dispatching property notifications.

For example Windows Phone Pivot Application is using MVC architecture. In my case I needed to communicate with a Bluetooth device and this required thread based property management.

The Bluetooth-device message was receiver, but property setter raised cross thread access exception in NotifyPropertyChanged… using a standard code like this:

public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged;
private void NotifyPropertyChanged(String propertyName)
{
    PropertyChangedEventHandler handler = PropertyChanged;
    if (null != handler)
    {
        handler(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName));
    }
}

So I needed a solution to invoke the handler in the right way.

In Stack Overflow first I found a solution for Windows Applications, but not Windows Phone applications 🙂

public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged;
private void NotifyPropertyChanged(String propertyName)
{

    PropertyChangedEventHandler handler = PropertyChanged;
    if (null != handler)
    {

        var e = new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName);
        foreach (EventHandler h in handler.GetInvocationList())
        {
            var synch = h.Target as ISynchronizeInvoke;
            if (synch != null && synch.InvokeRequired)

                synch.Invoke(h, new object[] { this, e });
            else
                h(this, e);
        }
    }
}

Then I needed to find a solution avoid using ISynchronizeInvoke (it’s not present in windows phone application)

The simplest solution was to directly use Deployment.Current.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke, but this I forgot because windows phone development is not my main occupation.

public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged;
private void NotifyPropertyChanged(String propertyName)
{
    PropertyChangedEventHandler handler = PropertyChanged;
    if (null != handler)
    {
        Deployment.Current.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() =>
        {
            handler(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName));
        });
    }
}

I hope this will help you as it’s helping me.