Pro WPF in C# 2008: Windows Presentation Foundation with .NET 3.5, Second Edition

Multithreading

Multithreading is the art of executing more than one piece of code at once. The goal of multithreading is usually to create a more responsive interface—one that doesn't freeze up while it's in the midst of other work—although you can also use multithreading to take better advantage of dual-core CPUs when executing a processor-intensive algorithm or to perform other work during a high-latency operation (for example, to perform some calculations while waiting for a response from a web service).

Early in the design of WPF, the creators considered a new threading model. This model—called thread rental—allowed user interface objects to be accessed on any thread. To reduce the cost of locking, groups of related objects could be grouped ...