Thread Safe Generic Collections for .NET

Copyright Philip Pierce © 2010 - 2014

I’ve been doing a lot of mult-threading work, recently, using the standard Thead classes, the Worker Queue, PLINQ (Parallel LINQ), and new TPL (Task Parallel Lirary). The problem with most of the built-in generic collections (Queue<>, List<>, Dictionary<>, etc), is that they are not thread safe. There is a thread-safe collection provided by .NET, but it's klunky and doesn't support everything I need.

I created a library of thread safe collections which allow me to use the standard generic collection actions (foreach, LINQ, etc), while at the same time being thread safe.

The classes in this library inherit from the appropriate collection interface (IEnumerable, ICollection, etc). Each class also has all the functions and properties that it’s original non-thread safe class has, including new functions (such as AddIfNotExistElseUpdate for TDictionary).

I've also included an extension to the ReaderWriterLockSlim, which allows me to wrap Read / Write locks in a more user-friendly manner. In addition, the extensions handle the issue of always having try/finally blocks on the locks.

I use the ReaderWriterLockSlim a lot, because of its versatility in locking, it's small use of resources, and its speed.