[newkidtopc]

Hello,
I hav a project which is monitoring the alarms which are generated in the factory.
It has a function which runs continuously monitoring these alarms.My application also provides for opening , printing of the files which are used to record these alarms.
My question is if the user is printing or viewing the contents of the fault file will the monitoring process continue?
Or does this task require multithreading so that monitoring and viewing/printing of files can occur simultaneously?
If it requires multithreading can someone please provide me some useful links.
BTW the project is to be done in VB.

[coderitr]

In most cases, the rest of your program will continue to run while the user is interacting with the interface. No special multithreading code is required to make that happen. I'm guessing that you're using a timer control to initiate the monitor on a specified interval in which case the system continues to fire the timer event as long as it is enabled.

[newkidtopc]

Thanks for replying coderitr,
I dont use timer control.
What I was asking about is that one part of my software is (a function) is continuously running checking for alarms.The alarms obtained from this function are displayed on screen.
I want that function to continue its work even if the user is viewing some other file from my applicationn itself(ie record of all faults) or say printing a file.
Does this require multitasking?

[coderitr]

Is the user using the same program that's doing the scan to see the results or print the report? If so then ...

(1) How does the user notify your program that he/she wants to use it?

(2) How does the scan function launch the user screen.

Multitasking is something that Windows (and Visual Basic) do all by themselves. You don't have to write special code to handle it but if you're not careful you can hurt yourself.

[newkidtopc]

Hello coderitr,
Basically its a single project.The first window that opens after running the program is the main window.
The main window gives the user the option about
1: whether to run the function which monitors the alarms
2: whether to print or view the fault files etc.
The function for monitoring the alarms is in the same project.
I want the project such that even if the user clicks on the menu bar to view the fault file etc. the background monitoring of the alarms has to continue.
Hope this answers your questions.
Cheers

[coderitr]

You need to create the scan function as a separate thread. Check out the CreateThread() WIN32 API for this.

[newkidtopc]

Thanks coderitr,
Thanks for that definite answer.
Cheers