TryEnterCriticalSection

A version of this page is also available for

Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R3

4/8/2010

This function attempts to enter a critical section without blocking. If the call is successful, the calling thread takes ownership of the critical section.

Syntax

BOOL TryEnterCriticalSection(
  LPCRITICAL_SECTION lpCriticalSection
);

Parameters

• lpCriticalSection
  [in] Specifies the critical section object.

Return Value

A nonzero value indicates that the critical section is successfully entered or the current thread already owns the critical section. Zero (FALSE) indicates that another thread already owns the critical section.

Remarks

The threads of a single process can use a critical section object for mutual-exclusion synchronization. The process is responsible for allocating the memory used by a critical section object, which it can do by declaring a variable of type CRITICAL_SECTION. Before using a critical section, some thread of the process must call the InitializeCriticalSection function to initialize the object.

To enable mutually exclusive use of a shared resource, each thread calls the EnterCriticalSection or TryEnterCriticalSection function to request ownership of the critical section before executing any section of code that uses the protected resource. The difference is that TryEnterCriticalSection returns immediately, regardless of whether it obtained ownership of the critical section, while EnterCriticalSection blocks until the thread can take ownership of the critical section. When it has finished executing the protected code, the thread uses the LeaveCriticalSection function to relinquish ownership, enabling another thread to become the owner and gain access to the protected resource. The thread must call LeaveCriticalSection once for each time that it entered the critical section.

Any thread of the process can use the DeleteCriticalSection function to release the system resources allocated when the critical section object was initialized. After this function is called, the critical section object can no longer be used for synchronization. If a thread terminates while it has ownership of a critical section, the state of the critical section is undefined.

Each object type, such as memory maps, semaphores, events, message queues, mutexes, and watchdog timers, has its own separate namespace. Empty strings ("") are handled as named objects. On Windows desktop-based platforms, synchronization objects all share the same namespace.

Requirements

See Also

Reference

Synchronization Functions
InitializeCriticalSection
EnterCriticalSection
LeaveCriticalSection
DeleteCriticalSection