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 2015. There are no other prerequisites. The source code for this recipe can be found at BookSamples\Chapter2\Recipe1.

How to do it...

To understand basic atomic operations, perform the following steps:

1. Start Visual Studio 2015. Create a new C# console application project.
2. In the Program.cs file, add the following using directives:

   using System;
   using System.Threading;
   using static System.Console;

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 => _count;
   
     public override void Increment()
     {
       _count++;
     }
   
     public override void Decrement()
     {
     ...