Seeking One-Size-Fits-All Context Based Storage

Question

First off, I wish context based storage was consistent across the framework!

With that said, I'm looking for an elegant solution to make these properties safe across ASP.NET, WCF and any other multithreaded .NET code. The properties are located in some low-level tracing helpers (these are exposed via methods if you're wondering why they're internal).

I'd rather not have a dependency on unneeded assemblies (like System.Web, etc). I don't want to require anyone using this code to configure anything. I just want it to work ;) That may be too tall of an order though...

Anyone have any tricks up their sleeves? (I've seen Spring's implementation)

    internal static string CurrentInstance
    {
        get
        {
            return CallContext.LogicalGetData(currentInstanceSlotName) as string;
        }
        set
        {
            CallContext.LogicalSetData(currentInstanceSlotName, value);
        }
    }

    internal static Stack<ActivityState> AmbientActivityId
    {
        get
        {
            Stack<ActivityState> stack = CallContext.LogicalGetData(ambientActivityStateSlotName) as Stack<ActivityState>;
            if (stack == null)
            {
                stack = new Stack<ActivityState>();
                CallContext.LogicalSetData(ambientActivityStateSlotName, stack);
            }

            return stack;
        }
    }

Update

By safe I do not mean synchronized. Background on the issue here

Answer 1

I don't know that using CallContext is the right move here if the desire is simply to provide thread-safe access to your properties. If that is the case, the lock statement is all you need.

However, you have to make sure you are applying it correctly.

With CallContext, you are going to get thread-safe access because you are going to have separate instances of CallContext when calls come in on different threads (or different stores, rather). However, that's very different from making access to a resource thread-safe.

If you want to share the same value across multiple threads, then the lock statement is the way to go. Otherwise, if you want specific values on a per-thread/call basis, use the CallContext, or use the static GetData/SetData methods on the Thread class, or the ThreadStatic attribute (or any number of thread-based storage mechanisms).