Visual Basic 2005 for Programmers: Deitel Developer Series, Second Edition

26.6. Synchronized Collections

In Chapter 15, we discussed multithreading. Most of the non-generic collections are unsynchronized by default, so they can operate efficiently when multithreading is not required. Because they are unsynchronized, however, concurrent access to a collection by multiple threads could cause logic errors in your programs. To prevent potential threading problems, synchronization wrappers are provided for many of the collections that might be accessed by multiple threads. A wrapper object receives method calls, adds thread synchronization (to prevent concurrent access to the collection) and passes the calls to the wrapped collection object. Most of the non-generic collection classes in the .NET Framework provide Shared ...