C# 5.0 Unleashed

Mutexes

Mutual exclusion of code executing simultaneously is the essential idea to tame the concurrency monster. In fact, the concept of a mutex got its name from it. Semaphores are the generalization of mutexes and are discussed in the next section.

Using a mutex, we could make our running example thread safe as follows. This piece of code illustrates the two main operations invoked with a mutex:

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static void Main(){    var mutex = new Mutex();    int n = 0;    var up = new Thread(() =>    {        for (int i = 0; i < 1000000; i++)        {            mutex.WaitOne();            n++;            mutex.ReleaseMutex();        }    });    up.Start();    for (int i = 0; i < 1000000; i++)    {        mutex.WaitOne();