Is this a correct Interlocked synchronization design?

Posted by Dan Bryant on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Dan Bryant
Published on 2010-04-07T21:23:12Z Indexed on 2010/04/07 21:33 UTC
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I have a system that takes Samples. I have multiple client threads in the application that are interested in these Samples, but the actual process of taking a Sample can only occur in one context. It's fast enough that it's okay for it to block the calling process until Sampling is done, but slow enough that I don't want multiple threads piling up requests. I came up with this design (stripped down to minimal details):

public class Sample
{
    private static Sample _lastSample;
    private static int _isSampling;

    public static Sample TakeSample(AutomationManager automation)
    {
        //Only start sampling if not already sampling in some other context
        if (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref _isSampling, 0, 1) == 0)
        {
            try
            {
                Sample sample = new Sample();
                sample.PerformSampling(automation);
                _lastSample = sample;
            }
            finally
            {
                //We're done sampling
                _isSampling = 0;
            }
        }

        return _lastSample;
    }

    private void PerformSampling(AutomationManager automation)
    {
        //Lots of stuff going on that shouldn't be run in more than one context at the same time
    }
}

Is this safe for use in the scenario I described?

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