Monitor.Wait Initially Locked?

Question

Background

I am trying to write an application that does the following:

1. I make a method call to SomeBlockingMethod.
2. This method calls blocks until I call SomeUnblockingMethod from another thread.
3. When SomeUnblockingMethod is called, the routine inside of SomeBlockingMethod will continue.

Note, the first thing I do will be to call the SomeBlockingMethod, and then later on I will call the SomeUnblockingMethod. I am thinking about using a Monitor.Wait/Monitor.Pulse mechanism to achieve this. The only thing is, when one calls Monitor.Wait, you cannot block initally unless the object involved has already been locked by something else (or at least not that I know of)... But, I want blocking to be the first thing I do... So this leads me into my question...

Question

Is there some way I can implement Monitor.Wait to initially block until a call to Monitor.Pulse is made?

Answer 1

You can use AutoResetEvent instead.

AutoResetEvent ar = new AutoResetEvent(false); // false set initial state as not signaled

Then you can use ar.WaitOne() to wait and ar.Set() to signal waiting processes.

You should use Monitor when you want to protect a resource or you have a critical section. If you want to have a signaling mechanism then AutoResetEvent or ManualResetEvent sounds like a better option.