23 11 2012
This article was originally published at tech.blinemedical.com
In .net 4, a new class called BlockingCollection was introduced, which let you have a threadsafe producer/consumer queue. Anyone consuming a BlockingCollection blocks automatically until new items are added. This lets you easily add items to the collection in one thread and use another synchronized thread to consume items. This class is great since before this existed, you had to do all this work with mutexes and it was a lot of extra work (and more error prone). In general, a good time to use a decoupled producer consumer pattern is when you have a slow consuming function and a producer thread that is time sensitive.
Even though BlockingCollection effectively synchronizes your producer/consumer, you still have to create boilerplate to manage the producer thread and the consumer thread. Also if you wanted to add extra exception handling or a cancellation token, you’d have … Read more