Use a Mutex

Bank Account
Bank Account in C#
using System;
using System.Threading;

public class BankAccount
{
    private readonly Mutex _mutex = new();

    private decimal _balance;
    private bool _isOpen;

    public void Open() => _isOpen = true;

    public void Close() => _isOpen = false;

    public decimal Balance => _isOpen ? _balance : throw new InvalidOperationException();

    public void UpdateBalance(decimal change)
    {
        if (!_isOpen)
            throw new InvalidOperationException("Account is closed");

        _mutex.WaitOne();

        try
        {
            _balance += change;
        }
        finally
        {
            _mutex.ReleaseMutex();
        }
    }
}

First, we define to field to keep track of our account's balance and whether the account is opened or closed:

private decimal _balance;
private bool _isOpen;
Caution

When dealing with monetary amount, always use decimal instead of float or double, as the later suffer from rounding errors.

The Open() and Close() methods change the open state:

public void Open()
{
    _isOpen = true;
}

public void Close()
{
    _isOpen = false;
}

The Balance property either returns the current balance if the account has been opened, or throws an InvalidOperationException if not:

public decimal Balance
{
    get
    {
        if (!_isOpen)
            throw new InvalidOperationException("Account is closed");

        return _balance;
    }
}

We then get to the core of the exercise: updating the balance in a safe way, without any concurrency issues. First, we check if the account is not actually closed, in which case we throw an InvalidOperationException:

public void UpdateBalance(decimal change)
{
    if (!_isOpen)
        throw new InvalidOperationException("Account is closed");

    ...
}

For that, we can use the Mutexclass, which allows programmatically restricting access to a section of code. This ensures that there is never any concurrent execution of the code within the mutex's restricted scope. Any other process wanting to execute the same code is halted until the currently executing process is done executing the mutex's code block.

Let's define an instance of the Mutex class:

private readonly Mutex _mutex = new Mutex();

We can then use the Mutex to signal that we want to acquire exclusive access by using its WaitOne() method. This method will block until there it has been released by any other process that has acquired the mutex.

_mutex.WaitOne();
_balance += change;
_mutex.ReleaseMutex();

We can then safely update the balance and finish off by releasing the mutex.

As our Mutex object is unique per instance of the BankAccount class, we won't have any issues with locking other bank accounts when we use the mutex. One potential issue we currently have is that the mutex is not released if the balance updating somehow throw an exception. To fix this, we'll release the mutex in a try/finally statement:

try
{
    _balance += change;
}
finally
{
    _mutex.ReleaseMutex();
}

Shortening

The Open() and Close() methods have just one single statement and thus can be written as expression-bodied methods:

public void Open() => _isOpen = true;
public void Close() => _isOpen = false;

The same can be done for the Balance property, using the ternary operator (? :):

public decimal Balance => _isOpen ? _balance : throw new InvalidOperationException();

Finally, we can use a target-typed new expression to replace new object with just new for creating the `Mutex`` (the compiler can figure out the type from the method's return type):

private readonly object _mutex = new();
6th Nov 2024 · Found it useful?