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+// Licensed to the .NET Foundation under one or more agreements.
+// The .NET Foundation licenses this file to you under the MIT license.
+// See the LICENSE file in the project root for more information.
+
+using System;
+using System.Diagnostics.Contracts;
+
+namespace System.Collections
+{
+ // Base interface for all collections, defining enumerators, size, and
+ // synchronization methods.
+ public interface ICollection : IEnumerable
+ {
+ // Interfaces are not serialable
+ // CopyTo copies a collection into an Array, starting at a particular
+ // index into the array.
+ //
+ void CopyTo(Array array, int index);
+
+ // Number of items in the collections.
+ int Count
+ { get; }
+
+
+ // SyncRoot will return an Object to use for synchronization
+ // (thread safety). You can use this object in your code to take a
+ // lock on the collection, even if this collection is a wrapper around
+ // another collection. The intent is to tunnel through to a real
+ // implementation of a collection, and use one of the internal objects
+ // found in that code.
+ //
+ // In the absense of a static Synchronized method on a collection,
+ // the expected usage for SyncRoot would look like this:
+ //
+ // ICollection col = ...
+ // lock (col.SyncRoot) {
+ // // Some operation on the collection, which is now thread safe.
+ // // This may include multiple operations.
+ // }
+ //
+ //
+ // The system-provided collections have a static method called
+ // Synchronized which will create a thread-safe wrapper around the
+ // collection. All access to the collection that you want to be
+ // thread-safe should go through that wrapper collection. However, if
+ // you need to do multiple calls on that collection (such as retrieving
+ // two items, or checking the count then doing something), you should
+ // NOT use our thread-safe wrapper since it only takes a lock for the
+ // duration of a single method call. Instead, use Monitor.Enter/Exit
+ // or your language's equivalent to the C# lock keyword as mentioned
+ // above.
+ //
+ // For collections with no publically available underlying store, the
+ // expected implementation is to simply return the this pointer. Note
+ // that the this pointer may not be sufficient for collections that
+ // wrap other collections; those should return the underlying
+ // collection's SyncRoot property.
+ Object SyncRoot
+ { get; }
+
+ // Is this collection synchronized (i.e., thread-safe)? If you want a
+ // thread-safe collection, you can use SyncRoot as an object to
+ // synchronize your collection with. If you're using one of the
+ // collections in System.Collections, you could call the static
+ // Synchronized method to get a thread-safe wrapper around the
+ // underlying collection.
+ bool IsSynchronized
+ { get; }
+ }
+}