A boolean lock using IDisposable

While there are more complex and functional lock mechanisms, I wanted a very simple lock that would tell me if an operation was locked or not. Normally I would just have a flag that’d be true or false, but I found that it was not always easy to remember to set the flag on or off, and also to make sure the flag was set at the right place. So I came up with this class :

public class BooleanLock
{
    public bool Locked { get; private set; }

    public class BlockLock : IDisposable
    {
        private BooleanLock _parent;

        public BlockLock(BooleanLock parent)
        {
            _parent = parent;
            _parent.Locked = true;
        }

        #region IDisposable Members

        public void Dispose()
        {
            _parent.Locked = false;
        }

        #endregion
    }

    public BlockLock Lock()
    {
        return new BlockLock(this);
    }
}

Now I could use it this way :

// Declare a field as a lock
private BooleanLock _myUpdateLock = new BooleanLock();

// Check for lock
private void UpdateSomeProperty(bool reset)
{
    if (_myUpdateLock.Locked)
        return;

    // . . .

And here’s where the lock is set :

// Part of the function is not re-entrant, so we use a lock there
private void OnSomePropertyChanged()
{
    if (some-condition)
    {
        using (_myUpdateLock.Lock())
        {
            // do non-re-entrant stuff
        } <-- lock is released here automatically

The big advantage here is that the C# compiler’s using-block behavior handles complex try–catch scenarios that I would otherwise have had to implement on my own.