J.P. Hamilton

If you are going to blog, I think it’s important to blog regularly (I say this after taking about a year off). The drawback is that you might not always have “big bang” articles. Still, I think this is kind of cool. Here’s a fluent interface that I added to System.Thread. I think this is a good example of adding a simple fluent interface to an existing .NET framework class.

For the record, I want to say that I often do experiments like this in my day to day work. I find that I am continually trying to find ways to make the code that I write more readable (within the context I am writing it).

public class ThreadWaitFor
{
    private readonly Thread _thread;
    private readonly int _value;

    public ThreadWaitFor(Thread thread, int value)
    {
        _thread = thread;
        _value = value;
    }

    public void Milliseconds()
    {
        _thread.Join(_value);
    }

    public void Seconds()
    {
        _thread.Join(_value * 1000);
    }

    public void Minutes()
    {
        _thread.Join((_value * 1000) * 60);
    }
}

public static class ThreadExtensions
{
    public static ThreadWaitFor WaitFor(this Thread thread, int value)
    {
        return new ThreadWaitFor(thread, value);
    }
}

This allows me to do this:

Thread.CurrentThread.WaitFor(30).Seconds();
Thread.CurrentThread.WaitFor(5).Minutes();
Thread.CurrentThread.WaitFor(1000).Milliseconds();