I have a multithreaded application that spawns threads for several hardware instruments. Each thread is basically an infinite loop (for the lifetime of the application) that polls the hardware for new data, and activates an event (which passes the data) each time it collects something new. There is a single listener class that consolidates all these instruments, performs some calculations, and fires a new event with this calculation.
However, I'm wondering if, since there is a single listener, it would be better to expose an IEnumerable<> method off these instruments, and use a yield return to return the data, instead of firing events.
I'd like to see if anybody knows of differences in these two methods. In particular, I'm looking for the best reliability, best ability to pause/cancel operation, best for threading purposes, general safety, etc.
Also, with the second method is it possible to still run the IEnumerable loop on a separate thread? Many of these instruments are somewhat CPU-bound, so ensuring each one is on a different thread is vital.