DexterPOSH's Blog

After setting up the context for the use case of the MutEx in previous post, it is time to do our homework on the topic. Theory MutEx as per the MSDN documentation is: " A synchronization primitive that grants exclusive access to the shared resource to only one thread. If a thread acquires a mutex, the second thread that wants to acquire that mutex is suspended until the first thread releases the mutex. "

This post is to give you context on a practical use case of using MutEx in PowerShell. From the  MSDN documentation  for the MutEx class , MutEx is : " A synchronization primitive that can also be used for  interprocess  synchronization." Mut - Mutually  Ex - Exclusive Recently while deploying AzureStack, I saw multiple failed deployments, partly because of me not paying attention.  But since it failed, I had to go and look at the code in an effort to see what went wrong. AzureStack runs all the deployment tasks for creating a POC by using scheduled tasks (runs in System context) heavily. Also the status of the deployment  is tracked by using XML files (these are placed under C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\AzureStack\), so they have to avoid conflicts in reading and writing of these XML files from these tasks which are separate PowerShell processes.