How do I make an eventhandler run asynchronously?

So you want to raise the event in a manner that prevents the listeners from blocking the background thread? Gimme a couple minutes to whip up an example; it’s pretty simple 🙂

Here we go: first an important note! Whenever you call BeginInvoke you must call the corresponding EndInvoke, otherwise if the invoked method threw an exception or returned a value then the ThreadPool thread will never be released back to the pool, resulting in a thread-leak!

class TestHarness
{

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        var raiser = new SomeClass();

        // Emulate some event listeners
        raiser.SomeEvent += (sender, e) => { Console.WriteLine("   Received event"); };
        raiser.SomeEvent += (sender, e) =>
        {
            // Bad listener!
            Console.WriteLine("   Blocking event");
            System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(5000);
            Console.WriteLine("   Finished blocking event");
        };

        // Listener who throws an exception
        raiser.SomeEvent += (sender, e) =>
        {
            Console.WriteLine("   Received event, time to die!");
            throw new Exception();
        };

        // Raise the event, see the effects
        raiser.DoSomething();

        Console.ReadLine();
    }
}

class SomeClass
{
    public event EventHandler SomeEvent;

    public void DoSomething()
    {
        OnSomeEvent();
    }

    private void OnSomeEvent()
    {
        if (SomeEvent != null)
        {
            var eventListeners = SomeEvent.GetInvocationList();

            Console.WriteLine("Raising Event");
            for (int index = 0; index < eventListeners.Count(); index++)
            {
                var methodToInvoke = (EventHandler)eventListeners[index];
                methodToInvoke.BeginInvoke(this, EventArgs.Empty, EndAsyncEvent, null);
            }
            Console.WriteLine("Done Raising Event");
        }
    }

    private void EndAsyncEvent(IAsyncResult iar)
    {
        var ar = (System.Runtime.Remoting.Messaging.AsyncResult)iar;
        var invokedMethod = (EventHandler)ar.AsyncDelegate;

        try
        {
            invokedMethod.EndInvoke(iar);
        }
        catch
        {
            // Handle any exceptions that were thrown by the invoked method
            Console.WriteLine("An event listener went kaboom!");
        }
    }
}