Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Read/Write Locks

A frequent scenario is when you have a shared resource that multiple reader threads need to access. In a scenario like this, you probably want to grant writing permissions just to a single thread to avoid concurrency problems. The .NET Framework provides the System.Threading.ReaderWriterLockSlim class, which provides a lock enabled for multiple threads reading and exclusive access for writing.

ReaderWriterLock Class

The .NET Framework still provides the ReaderWriterLock class, as in its previous versions, but it is complex and used to handle particular multithreading scenarios. Instead, as its name implies, the ReaderWriterLockSlim class is a light-weight object for reading and writing locks.

Generally an instance of this class ...