I would like to use Condition Variable in order to know when Messages Queue is not empty, i would like to use it in "HandleMessageQueue" as a thread
private static Queue<Message> messages = new Queue<Message>();
/// <summary>
/// function return the first message
/// </summary>
/// <returns>first message element</returns>
public static Message GetFirst()
{
return messages.Dequeue();
}
in another class:
/// <summary>
/// Function run while the clients connected and handle the queue message
/// </summary>
public static void HandleMessageQueue()
{
// ...
}
What you're probably looking for is a simple producer-consumer pattern. In this case I'd recommend using .NET's BlockingCollection
, which allows you to easily handle the following cases:
Here's a short code sample, read the comments for more information about what every bit does:
public class Queue : IDisposable
{
private readonly Thread _messageThread; // thread for processing messages
private readonly BlockingCollection<Message> _messages; // queue for messages
private readonly CancellationTokenSource _cancellation; // used to abort the processing when we're done
// initializes everything and starts a processing thread
public Queue()
{
_messages = new BlockingCollection<Message>();
_cancellation = new CancellationTokenSource();
_messageThread = new Thread(ProcessMessages);
_messageThread.Start();
}
// processing thread function
private void ProcessMessages()
{
try
{
while (!_cancellation.IsCancellationRequested)
{
// Take() blocks until either:
// 1) a message is available, in which case it returns it, or
// 2) the cancellation token is cancelled, in which case it throws an OperationCanceledException
var message = _messages.Take(_cancellation.Token);
// process the message here
}
}
catch (OperationCanceledException)
{
// Take() was cancelled, let the thread exit
}
}
// pushes a message
public void QueueMessage(Message message)
{
_messages.Add(message);
}
// stops processing and clean up resources
public void Dispose()
{
_cancellation.Cancel(); // let Take() abort by throwing
_messageThread.Join(); // wait for thread to exit
_cancellation.Dispose(); // release the cancellation source
_messages.Dispose(); // release the queue
}
}
Another option would be to combine a ConcurrentQueue<T>
with a ManualResetEvent
(events are roughly the .NET equivalent to condition variables), but that would be doing by hand what BlockingCollection<T>
does).