CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#console-application
flayn
flayn

Reputation: 5322

How to detect Console application freeze on mouse click

I have a simple WCF-Service that I run in the console when testing it. Sometime I want to have the console windows on top of the other windows so I click it. This activates the "Mark and Paste" command and then freezes the whole application (service becomes unresponsive) until I press enter.

I find that rather annoying.

I don't want to disable the "Mark and Paste", because sometimes I copy text from the console.

Is there any way to detect that the application is frozen?

If I knew when this was the case, I could maybe change the windows titel to display a warning.

EDIT: This is not a duplicate, because I want to know how to handle the freeze and not why it feels frozen. I know now that only the writing to the output is frozen, which causes my application to feel like it is frozen.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 655

Answers (1)

Evk
Evk

Reputation: 101583

As explained in this answer, in this mode terminal just stops reading from your application output, which causes your writes to that output (such as Console.WriteLine(...)) to hang.

If you control code that writes to console, you can achieve your goal (change console title when "freeze" is detected) like this:

static async Task WriteLine(string text) {            
    var delay = Task.Delay(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1));
    var writeTask = Task.Run(() => Console.WriteLine(text));
    var oldTitle = Console.Title;
    if (await Task.WhenAny(delay, writeTask) == delay) {
        // after one second Console.WriteLine still did not return
        // we are probably in "mark and paste" mode
        Console.Title = "FREEZED!";
    }
    // we cannot ignore our write, have to wait anyway
    await writeTask;
    Console.Title = oldTitle;
}

And using this method instead of regular Console.WriteLine. Of course this is of limited usage, but I think it answers your question.

You can test it with simple:

static async Task Main(string[] args) {
    while (true) {
        await WriteLine("test");
        Thread.Sleep(1000);
    }
}

and observe that console title will change to FREEZED! while you are in that mode, and will change back when you are out of it.

Upvotes: 4

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