.NET Reverse Semaphore?

Question

Perhaps it\'s too late at night, but I can\'t think of a nice way to do this.

I\'ve started a bunch of asynchronous downloads, and I want to wait until they all comp

Answer 1

Well... you can snatch all the semaphore counters on the main thread back in order to blocks when count is 0, rather than non-zero.

REVISED: Here I assumed 3 things:

• While the program is running, a new download job may start at any time.
• On exiting the program, there will be no more new downloads that needs taken care of.
• On exiting the program, you need to wait for the all the files to finish downloading

So here's my solution, revised:

Initializes the Semaphore with a large enough counter so you never hit the maximum (it could be simply 100 or just 10 depending on your situation):

var maxDownloads = 1000;
_semaphore = new Semaphore(0, maxDownloads);

Then on each downloads, begins with WaitOne() before starting the download so that in the event of program exiting, no downloads can start.

if (_semaphore.WaitOne())
    /* proceeds with downloads */
else
    /* we're terminating */

Then on download completion, release one counter (if we had acquired one):

finally { _semaphore.Release(1); }

And then on the "Exit" event, consume up all the counters on the Semaphore:

for (var i = 0; i < maxDownloads; i++)
    _semaphore.WaitOne();

// all downloads are finished by this point.

...