How to simply starve your windows forms app

I was rewriting on .NET 4 some of our internal benchmarking tools (ok, a cooler way to say I wrote a small utility to stress our components on high concurrent environments…), when I’ve deadlocked the… application itselfe!

Here’s what I’ve done:

            var tasks = Enumerable.Range(1, (int)numericUpDownNumberOfThreads.Value).Select(
                i =>
                {
                    var task = new Task(
                        () =>
                        {
                            Invoke(LogMessageDelegate, ">> I'm in:  " + i);
                            Thread.Sleep(new Random().Next(1000));
                            Invoke(LogMessageDelegate, "<< Bye bye: " + i);
                        }
                    );
                    task.Start();

                    return task;
                }
            ).ToArray();

            Invoke(this.LogMessageDelegate, ">> WaitAll");
            Task.WaitAll(tasks);
            Invoke(this.LogMessageDelegate, "<< WaitAll");

The way the Invoke method works is quite simply by sending a message to the correct thread, and if there is no message pumping no one will process the message. The solution was evolving on yet another thread:

            new Task(
                () =>
                {
                    var tasks = Enumerable.Range(1, (int)numericUpDownNumberOfThreads.Value).Select(
                        i =>
                        {
                            var task = new Task(
                                () =>
                                {
                                    Invoke(LogMessageDelegate, ">> I'm in:  " + i);
                                    Thread.Sleep(new Random().Next(1000));
                                    Invoke(LogMessageDelegate, "<< Bye bye: " + i);
                                }
                            );
                            task.Start();

                            return task;
                        }
                    ).ToArray();

                    Invoke(this.LogMessageDelegate, ">> WaitAll");
                    Task.WaitAll(tasks);
                    Invoke(this.LogMessageDelegate, "<< WaitAll");
                }
            ).Start();