How to pass data to Thread - Part 2

Passing data to Thread using ParameterizedThreadStart  is the easiest way but not a type safe way as Thead.Start accepts any object.

Alternative way is to encapsulate Thread procedure and data in a helper class and use the ThreadStart delegate to execute the Thread procedure.

Make a note that you cannot return data from the Thread as there is no way to retrieve data from an asynchronous call. To retrieve data, you need callback method....which will look at part 3 of this article.

Here is an example on how to pass data in a type safe way

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading;

namespace ThreadTypeSafe
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
TypeSafe ts = new TypeSafe(100, "This is message from a TypeSafe Thread with num as {0}");
Thread t1 = new Thread(ts.ThreadProc);
t1.Start();
t1.Join();
Console.WriteLine("Main thread exiting");
Console.ReadKey();
}
}

public class TypeSafe
{
private int _num;
private string _msg;

public TypeSafe(int num, string msg)
{
_num = num;
_msg = msg;
}

public void ThreadProc()
{
Console.WriteLine(_msg, _num);
}

}
}