I have two threads, a producer thread that places objects into a generic List collection and a consumer thread that pulls those objects out of the same generic List. I've got the reads and writes to the collection properly synchronized using the lock keyword, and everything is working fine.
What I want to know is if it is ok to access the Count property without first locking the collection.
JaredPar refers to the Count property in his blog as a decision procedure that can lead to race conditions, like this:
if (list.Count > 0)
{
return list[0];
}
If the list has one item and that item is removed after the Count property is accessed but before the indexer, an exception will occur. I get that.
But would it be ok to use the Count property to, say, determine the initial size a completely different collection? The MSDN documentation says that instance members are not guaranteed to be thread safe, so should I just lock the collection before accessing the Count property?
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