3rd party apps - threading issue?

[alreadyused]

First off I hope I am posting this to the right forum. We're using external apps and communicating through their dlls, so I think this is in the right spot.

 

We have a console app that automates printing; the user sends a list of requests, then the app retreives the docs, creates the appropriate class for that type of doc, does some work to it, then prints to the requested printer.

 

We have a main class that communicates with the other classes to perform the work (one finds/holds/tests the external app instances, one is a factory for creating the appropriate worker class, etc)

 

We have a sub main that launches the main class. We need the app to persist, and want the user to be able to type exit, but we also want to send the status to the console.

 

So this is what we had:

Public Shared Sub Main(args() as String)
   '...
   Dim myClass as new MyClass()
   myClass.doSomeStuff
   '...
   Dim doExit as boolean = false
   Do
       Dim s As String = System.Console.ReadLine()
       If s.ToLower() = "exit" Then doExit = True
   Loop Until doExit
   'finalize
   '...
End Sub

 

Up until recently, this was working fine. But then we added a VB6 app into the mix, and we started getting the non-pumping error. I immediately assumed that it was because of that loop and ReadLine. To me what it was saying is that we're blocking the main thread and that's causing issues.

 

I guess at this point, it's obvious that I'm weak on threading, right? :( By adding a reference to System.Windows.Forms and then adding Application.Run() into the Do Loop, we have worked around it and the error goes away.

 

But, I have this nagging suspicion that this isn't the best way to do it and it's going to sneak up and bite us later.

 

Is there a better way to do it? Or a tutorial I need to read/do?

 

-----------------------------

EDIT: I just found out that because of the Application.Run() statement, the loop is no longer effective. That's not a big deal, it was only there to keep the application alive anyway.

 

So now the app persists until a ctrl+c, alt+f4, ...

 

I read something on here yesterday that when doing an Application.Exit(), it still tries to call the dispose methods, we just may not see it while debugging, but it's not safe to rely on that. I'm not calling app.exit, but I'm assuming that the above are the equivalent to doing so?

 

So I still have the question of, does anyone have any suggestions on what would be better?

Edited January 18, 2008 by alreadyused