Windows® CE 3.0 Application Programming

Thread Local Storage and Dynamic Link Libraries

When writing a multithreaded application you not only need to ensure that your code is correctly synchronized, but also that any libraries you call are also written to be multithreaded. If your code calls functions in a Dynamic Link Library that are designed only for single-threaded calls, you can run into deadlock, race conditions, and other synchronization problems.

If you know that a library is single-threaded, you need to ensure that you always call functions in that library on the same thread. That way, two threads will not be actively calling functions in the library at the same time—this is called serialization.

When writing a library yourself you need to decide whether you want it to be ...