Question

I have the same BackgroundWorker code piece in two simultaneously running applications. Will this code avoid the problem of same resource getting access by two processes and run smoothly?

void bw_DoWork(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e)
    {
       bool flag = false;
       System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(1000);

       while (flag.Equals(false))
       {

           string dir = @"C:\ProgramData\Msgs";
           try
           {
               if (Directory.GetFiles(smsdir).Length > 0)
               {                      
                   flag = true;
               }

           }
           catch (Exception exc)
           {
               Logger.Log("Dir Access Exception: " + exc.Message);
               System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(10);
           }
       }        

Answer 1

On one level, depending on what you’re doing, there’s nothing wrong with having multiple applications accessing the same directory or file. If it’s just read access, then by all means, both can access it at once.

If you’ve got identical code in multiple applications, then a Boolean isn’t going to cut it for synchronization, no matter what you do: Each application has its own copy of the Boolean, and cannot modify the other.

For cross application synhronization, I’d use the Mutex class. There’s a constructor that takes a string parameter, specifying the name of the Mutex. Mutex names are unique across all of Windows, not just your application. You can do Mutex m = new Mutex(false, "MySpecialMutex"); in two different applications, and each object will be referring to the same thing.