Question

So this is a continuation from my last question – So the question was
“What is the best way to build a program that is thread safe in terms that it needs to write double values to a file. If the function that saves the values via streamwriter is being called by multiple threads? Whats the best way of doing it?”

And I modified some code found at MSDN, how about the following? This one correctly writes everything to the file.

namespace SafeThread
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main()
        {
            Threading threader = new Threading();

            AutoResetEvent autoEvent = new AutoResetEvent(false);

            Thread regularThread =
                new Thread(new ThreadStart(threader.ThreadMethod));
            regularThread.Start();

            ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(new WaitCallback(threader.WorkMethod),
                autoEvent);

            // Wait for foreground thread to end.
            regularThread.Join();

            // Wait for background thread to end.
            autoEvent.WaitOne();
        }
    }


    class Threading
    {
        List<double> Values = new List<double>();
        static readonly Object locker = new Object();
        StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter("file");
        static int bulkCount = 0;
        static int bulkSize = 100000;

        public void ThreadMethod()
        {
            lock (locker)
            {
                while (bulkCount < bulkSize)
                    Values.Add(bulkCount++);
            }
            bulkCount = 0;
        }

        public void WorkMethod(object stateInfo)
        {
            lock (locker)
            {
                foreach (double V in Values)
                {
                    writer.WriteLine(V);
                    writer.Flush();
                }
            }
            // Signal that this thread is finished.
            ((AutoResetEvent)stateInfo).Set();
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

Thread and QueueUserWorkItem are the lowest available APIs for threading. I wouldn’t use them unless I absolutely, finally, had no other choice. Try the Task class for a much higher-level abstraction. For details, see my recent blog post on the subject.

You can also use BlockingCollection<double> as a proper producer/consumer queue instead of trying to build one by hand with the lowest available APIs for synchronization.

Reinventing these wheels correctly is surprisingly difficult. I highly recommend using the classes designed for this type of need (Task and BlockingCollection, to be specific). They are built-in to the .NET 4.0 framework and are available as an add-on for .NET 3.5.