Mastering C# Concurrency

Reader-writer lock

It is very common to see samples of code where the shared state is one of the standard .NET collections: List<T> or Dictionary<K,V>. These collections are not thread safe; thus we need synchronization to organize concurrent access.

There are special concurrent collections that can be used instead of the standard list and dictionary to achieve thread safety. We will review them in Chapter 6, Using Concurrent Data Structures. For now, let us assume that we have reasons to organize concurrent access by ourselves.

The easiest way to achieve synchronization is to use the lock operator when reading and writing from these collections. However, the MSDN documentation states that if a collection is not modified while being read, synchronization ...