Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

The Barrier Class

The System.Threading namespace in .NET 4.0 introduces a new class named Barrier. The goal of this class is bringing a number of tasks that work concurrently to a common point before taking further steps. Tasks work across multiple phases and they signal they arrived at the barrier, waiting for all other tasks to arrive. The constructor of the class offers several overloads but all have in common the number of tasks participating in the concurrent work. You can also specify the action to take once they arrive at the common point (that is, they reach the barrier and complete the current phase). Notice that the same instance of the Barrier class can be used multiple times, for representing multiple phases. The following code demonstrates ...