question about System.Windows.Forms.Timer

Question

I am building a WinForms application reading from a socket data and charting lines. I am using System.Windows.Forms.Timer to trigger each second the event that

• gets data from a queue filled by a socket
• redraws lines on the chart

My Question is about the Timer object: I have one Timer object for each WinForm having a chart to redraws; so suppose I have 20 chart, I will have 20 forms with a total of 20 Timers.

Is this a good approach? I decided this based on the following(please correct me if I am wrong )

• Forms.Timer instance doesn't create a Thread on my application, but just triggers the event on receiving a WM_TIMER event from the message pump of the Form.
• it lives in the same thread of the GUI so I can directly access each element of my forms without worrying too much.

Are too much timers a good approach or could I have drawback? Thanks AFG

Answer 1

Why not redraw the line straight away when the data is received by the socket?

Answer 2

maybe better approach is to use a worker thread to receive data and use event fired from that worker thread to notify the UI to redraw itself.

Answer 3

This is a good approach, although you might want to reuse the timers instead of making a separate timer for each form.
For example, you could make a static Timer object and add a Tick handler in the form constructor. Remember to unsubscribe from the event when the form closes (in Dispose or OnClose), or your forms will never die.