Best way to do nothing until things are connected in C#

Question

I was reviewing the code to connect to the DB in one of the applications that I'm working on and I saw this

 if (_dbConnection == null)
     _dbConnection = GetConnection();

 while (_dbConnection.State == ConnectionState.Connecting)
 {
     //Do Nothing until things are connected.
 }

 if (_dbConnection.State != ConnectionState.Open)
     _dbConnection.Open();

 var command = GetCommand(commandType);
 command.Connection = _dbConnection;
 return command;

The while loop worries me. Is there a better way to Do Nothing until things are connected?

EDIT:

The connection is gotten as follows

private static IDbConnection GetConnection()
{
     return new SqlConnection(ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["CoonectionStringName"].ConnectionString);
}

Answer 1

Though the loop does work and is a valid strategy for waiting on some background operation, other answers seem to miss a key point; you have to let the background operation do some work. Churning through a while loop isn't very productive, but Windows will consider the app's main thread, which is probably what's doing the waiting, to be of high importance, and will spin through the loop hundreds or thousands of times before the background operation ever gets a single clock of CPU time.

To avoid this, use the Thread.Yield() statement to tell the processor to spin through all the other threads awaiting CPU time and come back when they're done. This allows the computer to get some work done while you're waiting on the background process, instead of monopolizing the CPU to spin through a basically empty loop. It's real simple; here's Justin's answer revised:

var startTime = DateTime.Now;
var endTime = DateTime.Now.AddSeconds(5);
var timeOut = false;

while (_dbConnection.State == ConnectionState.Connecting)
{
    if (DateTime.Now.CompareTo(endTime) >= 0)
    {
        timeOut = true;
        break;
    }
    Thread.Yield(); //tells the kernel to give other threads some time
}

if (timeOut)
{
    Console.WriteLine("Connection Timeout");
    // TODO: Handle your time out here.
}