Performing periodic audits and best practice

I'm doing a windows form and would like an audit task to happen every 30 seconds. This audit is essentially checking a series of services on remote computers and reporting back into a richtextbox the status.

Current I have this running in an endless background thread and using an invoker开发者_如何学Python to update the richtextbox in the main form.

Is this best practice? If I made an endless loop in my main form that would prevent any of my buttons from working, correct?

I'm just curious if every time I want to create a periodic audit check I have to create a new thread which checks the status or file or what have you?

Edit: I looked further into the Timer class and decided to go with System Timer as it proved to be better with a longer function. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

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You should look into the Windows Forms Timer class. You don't want a loop in your main form. It's better to use the timer to fire events which can be processed asynchronously on another thread.

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(I assume this is a winform application)

Invoking on the main thread is the way to go. But what about using a timer instead of an endless loop? It gives you more control. And a the timer function would execute on it's own thread.

It's good practice to let long going work execute on a background thread, so that the main thread can work with the UI.