Ian Griffiths posted an article on "How To Stop a Thread in .NET", but as Richard Blewett pointed out "...the thread has to be able to check the flag to know it has to bring itself down...".

Richard's solution is better but I prefer another for a number of reasons:

• The code could be waiting for 2 seconds before the Sleep gets interrupted
• We can get rid a a few lines of code
• I think this solution is clearer

What both articles are talking about is a shutdown event. In which case why not use the timeout for a sleep? So modifying Richard's code we have:

static ManualResetEvent
    shutdownEvent = new ManualResetEvent(false);

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    Thread t = new Thread(new ThreadStart(Func));
    t.Start();

    Console.ReadLine();

    // set the event to get the thread to come down cleanly
    shutdownEvent.Set();

    // wait for it to terminate
    t.Join();
}

static void Func()
{
    // open some resource that requires clean up
    using(FileStream fs =
                File.OpenWrite(@"C:\foo.txt"))
    {
        // check the event
        while(!shutdownEvent.WaitOne(10000, true))
        {
            // use the resource
            fs.WriteByte(0);
        }
    }
}