.NET 2.0 : File.AppendAllText(...) - Thread safe implementation

As an exercise in idle curiosity more than anything else, consider the following simple logging class:

internal static class Logging
{
    private static object threadlock;

    static Logging()
    {
        threadlock = new object(); 
    }

    internal static void WriteLog(string message)
    {
        try
        {
            lock (threadlock)
            {
                File.AppendAllText(@"C:\logfile.log", message);
            }
        }
        catch
        {
            ...handle logging errors...
        }
    }
}

Is the l开发者_如何学Cock needed around File.AppendAllText(...) or is the method inherently thread-safe by its own implementation ?

Searching for information on this yields a lot of contradictory information, some say yes, some say no. MSDN says nothing.

File.AppendAllText is going to acquire an exclusive write-lock on the log file, which would cause any concurrent thread attempting to access the file to throw an exception. So yes, you need a static lock object to prevent multiple threads from trying to write to the log file at the same time and raising an IOException.

If this is going to be an issue, I'd really suggest logging to a database table which will do a better job of handling concurrent log writers.

Alternatively, you can use TextWriterTraceListener which is thread-safe (well, it's going to do the locking for you; I'd rather write as little of my own multithreaded code as possible).

Testing parallel writes shows that you would get a System.IO.IOException if you were to comment out your lock statement.

[Test]
public void Answer_Question()
{
    var ex = Assert.Throws<AggregateException>(() => Parallel.Invoke(
        () => Logging.WriteLog("abc"),
        () => Logging.WriteLog("123")
    ));

    // System.IO.IOException: The process cannot access the file 'C:\Logs\thread-safety-test.txt' because it is being used by another process.
    Console.Write(ex);
}

It is thread safe in the sense that it opens the file with Read sharing, so assuming your filesystem honors file locks, only one thread will be allowed to write to the file at a time. Other threads may, however, get dirty reads if they are attempting to read the same file.