Sleeping Barber – C#

The sleeping barber is one of the problems which is used to demonstrate the correct thread notification mechanism. Here’s the a sample code for the sleeping barber problem in C# for .NET 4.0. Keep in mind that this code is optimized for the .NET 4.0 not for prior versions. You have concurrent collections in .NET 4.0.

 

using System;
using System.Threading;
using System.Collections.Concurrent;
using Microsoft.ConcurrencyVisualizer.Instrumentation;

namespace SleepingBarber
{
    class Program
    {
        internal static AutoResetEvent customerEvent = new AutoResetEvent(false);

        // no explict locks needed as it is a ConcurrentQueue > feature in .NET 4.0
        internal static ConcurrentQueue<Customer> queue = new ConcurrentQueue<Customer>();

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Random rand = new Random();

            // make the barber background so the program can exit once the main thread is finished.
            // this does not impact the thread priority.
            new Thread(Barber.CutHair) { IsBackground = true, Name = "Barber" }.Start();

            Thread.Sleep(100);

            Thread.CurrentThread.Name = "Main";
            // creating 25 customers in random order
            for (int i = 0; i <25; i++)
            {
                // temp is used to avoid the captured variable problem
                int temp = i;
                Thread.Sleep(rand.Next(600, 2000));
                Customer c = new Customer() {Name = "Customer " + temp };
                queue.Enqueue(c);

                if (queue.Count == 1)
                {
                    Customer.WakeUpBarber();
                }
            }

            Console.ReadKey();
        }
    }

    class Customer
    {
        public string Name { get; set; }

        internal static void WakeUpBarber()
        {
            Program.customerEvent.Set();
        }
    }

    class Barber
    {
        internal static void CutHair()
        {
            while (!Program.queue.IsEmpty)
            {
                Customer c;

                // time to cut the hair is 1 sec
                Thread.Sleep(1000);

                // after cutting hair barber removes him from the queue
                if (Program.queue.TryDequeue(out c))
                {
                    Console.WriteLine("Done hair cutting to {0}", c.Name);
                }
                else
                {
                    // this will never happen in this scenario as only one barber is here
                    Console.WriteLine(" 😦 customer is not going out ...");
                }
            }

            Console.WriteLine("Going to sleep.... grr...err....");
            GoToSleep();
        }

        private static void GoToSleep()
        {
            using (Markers.EnterSpan("wait start"))
            {
                Program.customerEvent.WaitOne();
                Console.WriteLine("Waking up..Oh ! Customer arrived..");
            }
            CutHair();
        }
    }
}

3 thoughts on “Sleeping Barber – C#

  1. The code is developed and tested using VS 2011 developor preview edition. There are some code lines to refer the Concurrency Visualizer SDK. Omit them while running in earlier versions.

  2. You may cause a stack overflow, don’t you?
    CutHair() =calls => GoToSleep()
    GoToSleep() =calls => CutHair()

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