Non-reentrant timers

Question

I have a function that I want to invoke every x seconds, but I want it to be thread-safe.

Can I set up this behavior when I am creating the timer? (I don\'t

Answer 1

I'm guessing, as your question is not entirely clear, that you want to ensure that your timer cannot re-enter your callback whilst you are processing a callback, and you want to do this without locking. You can achieve this using a System.Timers.Timer and ensuring that the AutoReset property is set to false. This will ensure that you have to trigger the timer on each interval manually, thus preventing any reentrancy:

public class NoLockTimer : IDisposable
{
    private readonly Timer _timer;

    public NoLockTimer()
    {
        _timer = new Timer { AutoReset = false, Interval = 1000 };

        _timer.Elapsed += delegate
        {
            //Do some stuff

            _timer.Start(); // <- Manual restart.
        };

        _timer.Start();
    }

    public void Dispose()
    {
        if (_timer != null)
        {
            _timer.Dispose();
        }
    }
}