Task scheduler for tasks that spawn other tasks

Question

I'm trying to implement a screensaver that draws shapes on the screen once every minute. For me, drawing a line is a task and creating a shape is also a task. My requirements are:

• when a shape is created, the application randomizes the number of lines the shape will be made of
• there should be no more than 10 tasks (of any kind) running in parallel
• once a shape is being created, then the shape is completed first vs having multiple shapes being created at the same time. (however, a 4-line shape and a 6-line shape should be drawn at the same time)

Any idea how a task scheduler for this looks like?

Answer 1

I think TaskScheduler is not the right tool for this job. Actually, I think TPL is not the right tool at all.

You don't want to compute different tasks concurrently to gain performance, which is what TPL is for. You want different things to happen on the screen at the same time. That's something completely different and you don't need parallelism for that.

You just need to figure out the rules when do you want new shape to start being drawn and what are the rules for what kind of shape it can be.