Collection was modified; enumeration operation may not execute

Question

I can\'t get to the bottom of this error, because when the debugger is attached, it does not seem to occur.

Collection was modified; enumeration operatio

Answer 1

The accepted answer is imprecise and incorrect in the worst case . If changes are made during ToList(), you can still end up with an error. Besides lock, which performance and thread-safety needs to be taken into consideration if you have a public member, a proper solution can be using immutable types.

In general, an immutable type means that you can't change the state of it once created. So your code should look like:

public class SubscriptionServer : ISubscriptionServer
{
    private static ImmutableDictionary subscribers = ImmutableDictionary.Empty;
    public void SubscribeEvent(string id)
    {
        subscribers = subscribers.Add(Guid.NewGuid(), new Subscriber());
    }
    public void NotifyEvent()
    {
        foreach(var sub in subscribers.Values)
        {
            //.....This is always safe
        }
    }
    //.........
}

This can be especially useful if you have a public member. Other classes can always foreach on the immutable types without worrying about the collection being modified.