Multithreading CSLA.NET

Question

I have a program that we'd like to multi-thread at a certain point. We're using CSLA for our business rules. At a one location of our program we are iterating over a BusinessList object and running some sanity checks against the data one row at a time. When we up the row count to about 10k rows it takes some time to run the process (about a minute). Naturally this sounds like a perfect place to use a bit of TPL and make this multi-threaded.

I've done a fair amount of multithreaded work through the years, so I understand the pitfalls of switching from single to multithreaded code. I was surprised to find that the code bombed within the CSLA routines themselves. It seems to be related to the code behind the CSLA PropertyInfo classes.

All of our business object properties are defined like this:

    public static readonly PropertyInfo<string> MyTextProperty = RegisterProperty<string>(c => c.MyText); 
public string MyText { 
get { return GetProperty(MyTextProperty); } 
set { SetProperty(MyTextProperty, value); } 
}

Is there something I need to know about multithreading and CSLA? Are there any caveats that aren't found in any written documentation (I haven't found anything as of yet).

--EDIT---

BTW: the way I implemented my multithreading via throwing all the rows into a ConcurrentBag and then spawning 5 or so tasks that just grab objects from the bag till the bag is empty. So I don't think the problem is in my code.

Answer 1

As you've discovered, the CSLA.NET framework is not thread-safe.

To solve your particular problem, I would make use of the Wintellect Power Threading library; either the AsyncEnumerator/SyncGate combo or the ReaderWriterGate on its own.

The Power Threading library will allow you queue 'read' and 'write' requests to a shared resource (your CSLA.NET collection). At one moment in time, only a single 'write' request will be allowed access to the shared resource, all without thread-blocking the queued 'read' or 'write' requests. Its very clever and super handy for safely accessing shared resources from multiple threads. You can spin up as many threads as you wish and the Power Threading library will synchronise the access to your CSLA.NET collection.