Microsoft® .NET Compact Framework Kick Start

Threads, Timers, and Windows CE

Modern operating systems support multitasking and multithreading. Multitasking is the capability of the operating system to load many programs into memory simultaneously and share CPU time between the programs. In modern operating systems with memory protections, each task is set in its own virtual address space, which cannot be accessed by other tasks. This arrangement makes computers much more stable, but it also means that the cost of setting up a new, independent computing job as its own task is relatively expensive.

Multithreading is the capability of the operating system to support many independent units of execution in a single process. Each unit of execution is a thread, and each thread receives slices ...