Timers and the MVP

[cgmt]

I am writing a Pluggin that is using a System.Timers and it fires every x seconds and when it does fire I need to refresh the screen as the background has changed. It works great on the main PC but not thru the MVP. I am just adding a handler in the activate event for the timer.Elapsed event... then in the handler I do the follwoing:
PluginHelperFactory.getPluginHelper.SetImage(x)
and I have even tried
PluginHelperFactory.getPluginHelper.ForceRepaint()

Anyone ideas would be appreciated..

[sub]

A lot of this GDI+ gui stuff doesnt like to be done on background threads, which is what happens when you use these timers. You should really using a scheme that returns 'true' from needsRendering() each time it needs to be updated.

[cgmt]

So instead of using a timer, are you sugesting that I basically become "busy for a period of time while I check the needsrendering property and when I do need to do something based on an internal counter(timer) and need to be refreshed, jsut use that property as the item to check while doing a continuious loop instead of a timer... Thanks in advance for your help....

To make things simpler, how would you recomend something firing every 10 seconds?

[sub]

So instead of using a timer, are you sugesting that I basically become "busy for a period of time while I check the needsrendering property and when I do need to do something based on an internal counter(timer) and need to be refreshed, jsut use that property as the item to check while doing a continuious loop instead of a timer...

No, thats not what I meant.

If your plugin is the active task, then GB-PVR will call needsRendering() once a second on your plugin. Usually this would return false, but if you want the screen updated, then you can return true. With this in mind, you could easily do something like:

declare a variable one the class to hold the last renderer time

Code:

private DateTime lastRenderTime = DateTime.Min;

add logic to the render method to updated it

Code:

public Image render(out bool requiresMoreRendering)
{            
     ...
     lastRenderTime = DateTime.Now;
     ...
}

Add code to needsRendering() to force update if the screen hasnt been updated in the last 10 seconds.

Code:

public bool needsRendering()
{
    if (lastRenderTime.AddSeconds(10) <= DateTime.Now)
        return true;
    return false;
}

There are lots of other ways this could be done, but most are just a variation on this theme.

[cgmt]

That works perfectly. Thanks for your help...