How to check the state of a semaphore

Question

I want to check the state of a Semaphore to see if it is signalled or not (so if t is signalled, I can release it). How can I do this?

EDIT1:

I have two threads, one would wait on semaphore and the other should release a Semaphore. The problem is that the second thread may call Release() several times when the first thread is not waiting on it. So the second thread should detect that if it calls Release() it generate any error or not (it generate an error if you try to release a semaphore if nobody waiting on it). How can I do this? I know that I can use a flag to do this, but it is ugly. Is there any better way?

Answer 1

You can check to see if a Semaphore is signaled by calling WaitOne and passing a timeout value of 0 as a parameter. This will cause WaitOne to return immediately with a true or false value indicating whether the semaphore was signaled. This, of course, could change the state of the semaphore which makes it cumbersome to use.

Another reason why this trick will not help you is because a semaphore is said to be signaled when at least one count is available. It sounds like you want to know when the semaphore has all counts available. The Semaphore class does not have that exact ability. You can use the return value from Release to infer what the count is, but that causes the semaphore to change its state and, of course, it will still throw an exception if the semaphore already had all counts available prior to making the call.

What we need is a semaphore with a release operation that does not throw. This is not terribly difficult. The TryRelease method below will return true if a count became available or false if the semaphore was already at the maximumCount. Either way it will never throw an exception.

public class Semaphore
{
    private int count = 0;
    private int limit = 0;
    private object locker = new object();

    public Semaphore(int initialCount, int maximumCount)
    {
        count = initialCount;
        limit = maximumCount;
    }

    public void Wait()
    {
        lock (locker)
        {
            while (count == 0) 
            {
                Monitor.Wait(locker);
            }
            count--;
        }
    }

    public bool TryRelease()
    {
        lock (locker)
        {
            if (count < limit)
            {
                count++;
                Monitor.PulseAll(locker);
                return true;
            }
            return false;
        }
    }
}