About Synchronization

To synchronize access to a resource, use one of the synchronization objects in one of the wait functions. The state of a synchronization object is either signaled or nonsignaled. The wait functions allow a thread to block its own execution until a specified nonsignaled object is set to the signaled state. For more information, see Interprocess Synchronization.

The following are other synchronization mechanisms:

• overlapped input and output
• asynchronous procedure calls
• critical section objects
• condition variables
• slim reader/writer locks
• one-time initialization
• interlocked variable access
• interlocked singly linked lists
• timer queues
• the MemoryBarrier macro

For additional information on synchronization, see Synchronization and Multiprocessor Issues.