Threading Woes

Until recently I've gotten away with only looking at or making minor tweaks to VB.Net code. I've now been tasked with modifying a web service that involved reviving some cached values in a background thread so the user wasn't left waiting for the task to finish. If the values were cached the service responded well but once the cache expired there was a long wait (minutes) for any request that came in while the cache was rebuilt. The solution, until a replacement service is completed, was to preemptively rebuild the cache in a thread prior to expiry. The solution involved locks to ensure only one thread is rebuilding the cache at once and thus prevent cycles spent needlessly rebuilding the cache multiple times. Locks in VB are created using SyncLock which is like lock in C#. The challenging bit for me (and I now know way more about VB than I ever intended to) was that the Static keyword in VB does not work the way you would expect coming from a C# perspective (or any other perspective I've encountered for that matter) and can only be applied to local variables and properties. It turns out what I really wanted was a Private Shared ReadOnly object although it took me some time and plenty of tinkering to come to that conclusion.

Also, despite the great thread debugging tools available in Visual Studio, print statements proved invaluable in actually seeing what order things were happening in and seeing when the locks were actually working or not. Sometimes the simplest approach is the most effective.