The DoEvents does allow the user to click around or type and trigger other events, and background threads are a better approach.
However, there are still cases where you may run into issues that require flushing event messages. I ran into a problem where the RichTextBox control was ignoring the ScrollToCaret() method when the control had messages in queue to process.
The following code blocks all user input while executing DoEvents:
using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using System.Windows.Forms;
namespace Integrative.Desktop.Common
{
static class NativeMethods
{
#region Block input
[DllImport("user32.dll", EntryPoint = "BlockInput")]
[return: MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.Bool)]
private static extern bool BlockInput([MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.Bool)] bool fBlockIt);
public static void HoldUser()
{
BlockInput(true);
}
public static void ReleaseUser()
{
BlockInput(false);
}
public static void DoEventsBlockingInput()
{
HoldUser();
Application.DoEvents();
ReleaseUser();
}
#endregion
}
}