Let's think your application (process) is a project manager and each thread of it as a project team member. You surely want your team members to work together, not independently, right? For this you would want them to instruct and manage based on guidelines, work approach, periodic status reporting, team communication, proper resource utilization, conflict prevention, etc. You would want to have total control over the work environment to get the final target to accomplish. So here you need to have synchronization among team members. In the same way, we need synchronization among threads.

Important constructs which we can use for Synchronization

Some important objects which we can use for Synchronization are given below. We will see uses of all these in later part of the article.

1.    To block current thread

·         Sleep() - This is used very commonly to block thread for some specified time interval (in milliseconds)

·         Join() - To block current thread and instantiate another thread. When new thread finishes, it will resume its processing.

2.    To implement code locking mechanism among threads

·         SyncLock - To lock some part of code to be run by only one thread at a time. SyncLock term is used in VB.Net. Its C# equivalent is Lock.

·         Monitor - Similar to mutex in the functionality but different coding approach with extra implementation features.

·         Mutex - To lock some part of code to be run by only one thread at a time with cross-process accessibility feature. Mutex is the extension of windows kernel objects.

·         Semaphore - To lock some part of code to be run by only one thread at a time with cross-process accessibility feature, with additional feature to prevent deadlock in better way. Semaphore is the extension of kernel objects.

·         Synchronization Context - To lock some part of code to be run by only one thread at a time just by using class attribute [Synchronization] and inheriting ContextBoundObject class.

·         ReaderWriteLock - To allow specific number of threads to run particular set of code simultaneously with some access privilege set among them.

3.    To implement event-driven thread synchronization in the application

·         EventWaitHandle - A class which provides some methods and properties to manage threads by sending/receiving event signal among each other. This also uses windows kernel object internally to perform the task. Two important class which we use are:

·         1. AutoResetEvent

·         2. ManualResetEvent

I will describe the implementation procedures of each one right from here. It will continue in my next few articles as well.