Building Async Coordination Primitives, Part 7: AsyncReaderWriterLock

Stephen Toub - MSFTFebruary 12, 2012Feb 12, 201202/12/12

In my last past, we looked at building an AsyncLock in terms of an AsyncSemaphore.  In this post, we’ll build a more advanced construct, an asynchronous reader/writer lock.
An asynchronous reader/writer lock is more complicated than any of the previous coordination primitives we’ve created. 

Building Async Coordination Primitives, Part 6: AsyncLock

Stephen Toub - MSFTFebruary 12, 2012Feb 12, 201202/12/12

Last time, we looked at building an AsyncSemaphore.  Here, we’ll look at building support for an async mutual exclusion mechanism that supports scoping via ‘using’.
As mentioned in the previous post, semaphores are great for throttling and resource management.  You can give a semaphore an initial count of the number of things to protect,

Building Async Coordination Primitives, Part 5: AsyncSemaphore

Stephen Toub - MSFTFebruary 12, 2012Feb 12, 201202/12/12

In my last few posts, I covered building an AsyncManualResetEvent, an AsyncAutoResetEvent, an AsyncCountdownEvent, and an AsyncBarrier.  In this post, I’ll cover building an AsyncSemaphore class.
Semaphores have a wide range of applicability.  They’re great for throttling, for protected access to a limited set of resources,

Building Async Coordination Primitives, Part 4: AsyncBarrier

Stephen Toub - MSFTFebruary 11, 2012Feb 11, 201202/11/12

Last time, we looked at building an AsyncCountdownEvent.  At the end of the post, I highlighted a common pattern for using such a type, which is for all of the participants to signal and then wait for all of the other participants to signal as well. 

Building Async Coordination Primitives, Part 2: AsyncAutoResetEvent

Stephen Toub - MSFTFebruary 11, 2012Feb 11, 201202/11/12

In my last post, I discussed building an asynchronous version of a manual-reset event.  This time, we’ll build an asynchronous version of an auto-reset event.
A manual-reset event is transitioned to the signaled state when requested to do so (i.e. calling Set()),

Building Async Coordination Primitives, Part 1: AsyncManualResetEvent

Stephen Toub - MSFTFebruary 11, 2012Feb 11, 201202/11/12

The Task-based Async Pattern (TAP) isn’t just about asynchronous operations that you initiate and then asynchronously wait for to complete.  More generally, tasks can be used to represent all sorts of happenings, enabling you to await for any matter of condition to occur.