Synchronization Context

A context is a set of properties or usage rules that are common to a collection of objects with related run-time execution. The context properties that can be added include policies regarding synchronization, thread affinity, and transactions. In short, a context groups together like-minded objects. In this strategy, we use the SynchronizationAttribute class to enable simple, automatic synchronization for ContextBoundObject objects. Objects that reside in a context and are bound to the context rules are called context-bound objects. .NET automatically associates a synchronization lock with the object, locking it before every method call and releasing the lock (to allow other competing threads to access the object) when the method returns. This is a huge productivity gain, because thread synchronization and concurrency management are among the most difficult tasks that a developer encounters.

The SynchronizationAttribute class is useful to programmers who do not have experience of dealing with synchronization manually because it covers the instance variables, instance methods, and instance fields of the class to which this attribute is applied. It does not, however, handle synchronization of static fields and methods. It also does not help if you have to synchronize specific code blocks; synchronizing the entire object is the price you have to pay for ease of use. SynchronizationAttribute is very handy when programming with System.EnterpriseServices where objects belonging to a context (for example a transaction) are grouped together by the COM+ runtime.