Is there a better waiting pattern for c#?

A much better way to implement this pattern is to have your Thing object expose an event on which the consumer can wait. For example a ManualResetEvent or AutoResetEvent. This greatly simplifies your consumer code to be the following

if (!Thing.ManualResetEvent.WaitOne(sleep_time)) {  throw new ItDidntHappen();}// It happened

The code on the Thing side is also not really any more complex.

public sealed class Thing {  public readonly ManualResetEvent ManualResetEvent = new ManualResetEvent(false);  private void TheAction() {    ...    // Done.  Signal the listeners    ManualResetEvent.Set();  }}

Use events.

Have the thing you are waiting for raise an event when it's finished (or failed to finish within the allotted time) and then handle the event in your main application.

That way you don't have any Sleep loops.

A loop is not a TERRIBLE way to wait for something, if there's nothing else for your program to do while it waits (for instance while connecting to a DB). However, I see some issues with yours.

    //It's not apparent why you wait exactly 10 times for this thing to happen    for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)    {        //A method, to me, indicates significant code behind the scenes.        //Could this be a property instead, or maybe a shared reference?        if (Thing.WaitingFor())         {            break;        }        //Sleeping wastes time; the operation could finish halfway through your sleep.         //Unless you need the program to pause for exactly a certain time, consider        //Thread.Yield().        //Also, adjusting the timeout requires considering how many times you'll loop.        Thread.Sleep(sleep_time);    }    if(!Thing.WaitingFor())    {        throw new ItDidntHappenException();    }

In short, the above code looks more like a "retry loop", that's been bastardized to work more like a timeout. Here's how I would structure a timeout loop:

var complete = false;var startTime = DateTime.Now;var timeout = new TimeSpan(0,0,30); //a thirty-second timeout.//We'll loop as many times as we have to; how we exit this loop is dependent only//on whether it finished within 30 seconds or not.while(!complete && DateTime.Now < startTime.Add(timeout)){   //A property indicating status; properties should be simpler in function than methods.   //this one could even be a field.   if(Thing.WereWaitingOnIsComplete)   {      complete = true;      break;   }   //Signals the OS to suspend this thread and run any others that require CPU time.   //the OS controls when we return, which will likely be far sooner than your Sleep().   Thread.Yield();}//Reduce dependence on Thing using our local.if(!complete) throw new TimeoutException();