Progress Dialog and Threading
===

I am targeting Android 4.0 and am communicating with a telemetry device using TCP/IP.  Android 4.0 forces all networking to be done in a separate thread.  First I open a socket, then I contact the device and download some information all from a separate thread.  At this point I want to display a progress dialong to show the progress of downloading more detailed information.  My problem is that I cannot show the progress dialog from anywhere but the main UI.  But, I do not know when I have reached the point in the other thread where I am ready to display the progress dialog.  Is there some way I can check for this from the main UI without tying up the system?