Thread: Question...

When you program a Win32 Application, does it only handle one thing at a time?

Say, if I used SetTimer() to post a message every 30 seconds, and when the window received that timer message it would put up a message box. Would this timer/message box be paused if another function was executing?

The reason I ask is that I'm doing things with linked lists, and I have a timer that triggers a function that searches through the list and deletes/adds things. Now, it wouldn't be good if a function was dealing with an object in the list and then the timer function went and deleted that object.

Any help will be appreciated. Thank you.

When you program a Win32 Application, does it only handle one thing at a time?

When you have only one execution thread, and this is probably your case, only one thing at a time is performed.

If you do this kind of design, you should have guaranteed that while manipulating with linked list, timer will not be triggered out. In another words, while executing timer handler assure yourself that the list is in quiet state, that is no action is performed on the list. I would use global BOOL variable that contained actual state of the list to do this.