The volatile keyword indicates that a field can be modified in the program by something such as the operating system, the hardware, or a concurrently executing thread.

volatile declaration

where:

declaration

The declaration of a field.

Remarks

The system always reads the current value of a volatile object at the point it is requested, even if the previous instruction asked for a value from the same object. Also, the value of the object is written immediately on assignment.

The volatile modifier is usually used for a field that is accessed by multiple threads without using the lock statement to serialize access. Using the volatile modifier ensures that one thread retrieves the most up-to-date value written by another thread.

The type of a field marked as volatile is restricted to the following types:

• Any reference type.
• Any pointer type (in an unsafe context).
• The types sbyte, byte, short, ushort, int, uint, char, float, bool.
• An enum type with an enum base type of byte, sbyte, short, ushort, int, or uint.

For more information on volatile, see 10.4.3 Volatile fields.

Example

The following sample shows how to declare a public field variable as volatile.

// csharp_volatile.cs
class Test
{
   public volatile int i;
   
   Test(int _i)
   {
      i = _i;
   }
   public static void Main()
   {
      
   }
}

See Also

C# Keywords | Modifiers | 10.4.3 Volatile fields