Basic Thread Safety

Abstract

In the last two chapters, we looked at numerous ways of starting work that will run asynchronously. However, in all of the examples, that work has been relatively self-contained. Asynchrony opens up a whole new class of bugs that can infect your code: race conditions, deadlocks, and data corruption to name just three. We will look at how you debug asynchronous code in Chapters 15 and 16, but our starting point has to be how to prevent these issues in the first place. In this chapter, we will examine the need for thread safety and then introduce the primary tools used to achieve it. In Chapter 5, we will take this idea further and look at the constructs introduced in .NET 4.0 that take some of the work off our shoulders.