Programming .NET Components, 2nd Edition

Manual Synchronization

.NET manual synchronization provides a rich set of synchronization locks familiar to any veteran Win32 programmer, such as monitors, events, mutexes, semaphores, and interlocks. .NET also introduces some language features that automate the use of locks, and a new lock type (the reader/writer lock). Manual synchronization is at the other end of the spectrum from automatic synchronization, on a number of dimensions. First, whereas a synchronization domain is in effect a mega-macro lock, manual synchronization offers fine-grained control over what is locked: you can control access to an object, its individual members, or even a single line of code. As a result, you can potentially improve overall application performance and throughput.

You can use manual synchronization on any .NET component, whether context-bound or not. Unlike with automatic synchronization, when you use manual synchronization, as the name implies, you explicitly manage the locking and unlocking

: .NET Enterprise Services Activities

.NET Enterprise Services offer a different automatic synchronization mechanism for serviced components (a subclass of context-bound components), called activities . You apply activities using what looks like an identical implementation of the Synchronization attribute. In fact, the Synchronization attribute that configures synchronization domains is based on the syntax of the Synchronization attribute in the System.EnterpriseServices namespace. Activities are conceptually ...