Mastering C# Concurrency

Using locks

There are different types of locks in C# and .NET. We will cover these later in the chapter, and also throughout the book. Let us start with the most common way to use a lock in C#, which is a lock statement.

Lock statement

Lock statement in C# uses a single argument, which could be an instance of any class. This instance will represent the lock itself.

Reading other people's codes, you could see that a lock uses the instance of collection or class, which contains shared data. It is not a good practice, because someone else could use this object for locking, and potentially create a deadlock situation. So, it is recommended to use a special private synchronization object, the sole purpose of which is to serve as a concrete lock:

// Bad ...