Summary

This chapter covered one of the thornier avenues of custom programming: designing your own singleton components. We looked at the fundamentals, including tracking clients, synchronizing resources, and using custom scheduling and pooling algorithms. However, creating a singleton object that's efficient and robust enough to use in an enterprise system is no small feat. The material covered in this chapter is the essential groundwork, but it doesn't provide the enhancements and experience you'll need to tailor a singleton component to your needs. For some practical examples that bring together threading, multiple clients, and asynchronous task processing, refer to the case studies in the third part of this book.

Finally, we finished up the chapter with a look at creating, installing, and programmatically controlling Windows services.