Performing basic atomic operations

This recipe will show you how to perform basic atomic operations on an object to prevent the race condition without blocking threads.

Getting ready

To step through this recipe, you will need Visual Studio 2012. There are no other prerequisites. The source code for this recipe could be found at 7644_Code\Chapter2\Recipe1.

How to do it...

To understand the basic atomic operations, perform the following steps:

1. Start Visual Studio 2012. Create a new C# Console Application project.
2. In the Program.cs file, add the following using directives:

   using System;
   using System.Threading;

3. Below the Main method, add the following code snippet:

   static void TestCounter(CounterBase c)
   {
     for (int i = 0; i < 100000; i++)
     {
       c.Increment();
       c.Decrement();
     }
   }
   
   class Counter : CounterBase
   {
     private int _count;
     public int Count { get { return _count; } }
   
     public override void Increment()
     {
       _count++;
     }
   
     public override void Decrement()
     {
       _count--;
    ...