Threading in C#

I am hella excited. I am going to attend my first Oklahoma City .NET Users Group meeting on Monday.

Paul Ballard is going to be giving a talk on .NET multi-threading. My last project
was severely multi-threaded, but that was C++/MFC so I thought I would write a small multi-threaded C# program to get a little bit of background.

My last project involved reading data from piece of hardware. These values were floating point values that tended to bounce a bit. I have done very little C#, so I thought I would write a multi-threaded program that would simulate the variance in these values. I figured it would introduce me to random number generation as well as threading, and I am sure I will need random numbers at some point. I am not going to offer much commentary, but here is the code:

using System;

using System.Threading;



namespace CSThreads

{

  class Class1

  {

    // Flag to tell data provider

    // thread how long to run

    public static bool isRunning;



    // The data point of interest

    public static double dataPoint;



    // Sync's access to the data 

    // point

    public static Mutex myMutex;



    [STAThread]

    static void Main(string[] args)

    {

      // Set running flag

      isRunning = true;



      // Init Mutex

      myMutex = new Mutex();



      dataPoint = 100.0;



      // Data providing thread

      Thread myThread = new Thread(

        new ThreadStart(

          ThreadProc));



      // Start the data providing

      // thread

      myThread.Start();



      // Read data from other thread

      for (int i = 0; i < 20; ++i)

      {

        // Wait a bit

        Thread.Sleep(500);



        // Wait to access resource

        // until it is safe

        myMutex.WaitOne();



        // Retrieve the value

        // of interest

        double currentValue

          = dataPoint;



        // Unlock resource

        myMutex.ReleaseMutex();



        // Give the output

        Console.WriteLine("The value

          of the data point is

          {0}",

          currentValue.ToString());

      }



      // Tell data providing thread

      // to terminate

      isRunning = false;

    }



    static void ThreadProc()

    {

      // Use the number of the beast

      // as the initial seed

      int i = 43;



      // Do until the other

      // thread tells us not to

      while (isRunning)

      {

        // Initialize Random object,

        // increase seed for variety

        Random r = new Random(i++);

        // Wait to access resource

        // until it is safe

        myMutex.WaitOne();



        // Generate a random number

        // between 95.0 and 105.0

        dataPoint = (double)r.Next(

          -5000, 5000)/1000.0 

          + 100.0;



        // Unlock the resource

        myMutex.ReleaseMutex();



        // Wait a bit

        Thread.Sleep(500);

      }

    }

  }

}