Is it possible (adviseable) to display a WindowsForm while running a strategy?

[tradefaz]

tradefaz,

I think the least intrusive (and dirtiest) way of getting data from a particular strategy to a non-modal windows form is by global variables. You can make an empty indicator with some design scheme, chart / form identifier, etc to set / get specific data.

I'm sure there is a more elegant way of passing data from one to the next like subscribing to an event that a strategy fires, or reading from a strategy object (if such exists). Maybe we can delve into the NT libraries and see what is open for use?

Just a few thoughts

I think that there are race conditions inherent in that approach. I think the safest and least intrusive way is to keep the form in a separate process, that is the only way to guarantee that it's not affecting the threading in NT. Communicating with Win32 locking primatives and shared global memory resources will also safeguard against race conditions. It's a little more work, but the benefit is worth it. I'lll post whatever I come up with.

[terenyi]

I don't know if this helps (I haven't tried opening a window) but these are my experiences with threads:

I've implemented an interface which allows to use MATLAB to run neural networks (I'll post this here once everything is polished). Since the training of a neural network takes quite a while (and even though MATLAB is doing the actual calculations it's still blocking the application), I'm running this in a separate thread. I'm using static volatile variables to sync everything.

So far everything works fine and as expected. They only thing you have to be careful about is to catch any exceptions in your thread as uncaught exception will crash the whole application.

Anyway, I see no reason why a custom thread should not be able to open and manage a window.