Among the synchronization base classes for task coordination, an excellent feature of .NET is the Barrier class. Even though locking is an excellent mechanism, you will almost certainly find yourself in a situation where some very complex task issues another mechanism that you would need to solve successfully. The Barrier class enables you to temporarily stop (pause) execution of a task or a collection of tasks at a certain point in the application and continue when all tasks reach that point. For synchronization, this feature is important in order for a series of multiple tasks to be executed in parallel steps.

When an application creates a Barrier object, it has to specify the number of tasks in set that will be synchronized. This value can be observed as a task counter that is internally maintained inside the Barrier object. This value can be incremented using the Barrier::AddParticipant method, or decremented using the Barrier::RemoveParticipant method. When the task...