Subj : Threading and Timeouts
To   : comp.programming.threads
From : MC
Date : Mon Jul 18 2005 11:03 pm

Hi all,

Please let me know if there's a more appropriate group for my
question--perhaps a Windows group.  I suspect it's more of a general
threading Q though...

First off, I'm in the WinAPI environment and I'm finding that
asynchronous API calls for connecting to an FTP server are very
tedious.  I'd prefer not to deal with all the states and handles if
possible--hence the idea of using synchronous API calls in a separate
thread.  Here's the question: if the main thread creates a worker
thread and the worker makes a synchronous call--say to connect to the
FTP server--what's the best way to implement a timeout on that call?
What I've thought of so far is:

main thread starts a timer
main thread starts worker thread
if timer ticks before worker is complete then terminate worker thread

However, according to MSDN, terminating a thread should only be used
as a last resort because it doesn't do proper cleanup.  But then how
else can a timeout be implemented, given that the worker thread is
busy in a synchronous API call?  Am I doing this all wrong??

Thanks for any help!
Craig

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