Question

I have System.Collections.Generic.SynchronizedCollection shared collection. Our code uses .Net 4.0 Task library to span threads and pass the synchronized collection to the thread. So far threads has not been adding or removing items into the collection. But the new requirement which requires one of the thread has to remove items from the collection while the other thread just read the collection. Do I need to add lock before removing the items from the Collection? If so, would reader thread be thread safe? Or Suggest best way to get the thread safety?

Answer 1

Yes, SynchronizedCollection will do the locking for you.

If you have multiple readers and just one writer, you may want to look at using a ReaderWriterLock, instead of SynchronizedCollection.

Also, if you are .Net 4+ then take a look at System.Collections.Concurrent. These classes have much better performance than SynchronizedCollection.