Discovering patterns for thread cancellation

There are different methods of listening for cancellation requests from a thread or task. So far, we have seen examples of managing these requests by either handling the OperationCanceledException type or checking the value of IsCancellationRequested. The pattern of checking IsCancellationRequested, usually inside a loop, is called polling. First, we will see another example of this pattern. The second pattern we will examine is receiving the notification by registering a callback method. The final pattern that we will cover in this section is listening to cancellation requests with wait handles using ManualResetEvent or ManualResetEventSlim.

Let’s start by trying another example of handling a cancellation request by polling.

Canceling with polling

In this section, we will create another example that uses polling to cancel a background task. The previous example of polling was running in a background thread on the ThreadPool...