how can I cause my application to wait and then resume after a while in .net?

Have u considered using the Timer class?

eg
Timer myTimer = new Timer();
myTimer.Elapsed += new ElapsedEventHandler( DisplayTimeEvent );
myTimer.Interval = 1000;
myTimer.Start();

'do stuff


and the function that has been defined above can be coded like this

public static void DisplayTimeEvent( object source, ElapsedEventArgs e )
{
Console.Write("\r{0}", DateTime.Now);
}



Now Im thinking a infinite loop but not sure how you track mouse movements or keypresses

r u using windowsforms? I think there is a mousemove event u can capture - cant remember

But I got this link which may help you capture mouse movements, so that u can come out the loop that u have after your timer definiton, hope this helps http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/Global...

Create a new thread, run the routine on the new thread and use sleep to pause the thread for 5 minutes.

This leaves your form which runs on the main thread responsive without having to do mouse event trapping etc.

If you need to capture an event from your routine on the separate thread,use callback functions.

Here are a couple of links and tutorials:
http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/...
http://www.codersource.net/csharp_tutori...
http://www.yoda.arachsys.com/csharp/thre...
http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/...

Hope this helped

Cheers

Peter

thanks and sorry for not getting back to this before.
Peter, your solution was the one I was looking for...

You can use the following to make the system to sleep for certain time

Threading.Thread.Sleep(Time)

here time is in milli seconds

If you want some thing like implementing progress bar while retrieving data let me know
- Rajavardhan Sarkapally