http://code.analyticgal.com/ en-us 40 AnalyticGal - Code Blog comments In general, I'd recommend against synchronizing with "lock(this)". The reason is that the object this method is encapsulated by could be used by external methods for locking, thus starving your encryption method. It's good form to create a private internal object (I usually call mine lockObject, with something more descriptive used only if I need more than one) and synchronize only on this internal object. That way, your object itself will have total control over it's lock. It would be a nasty unintended side-effect if a consumer of an object discovered by chance that his call to your encryption method was blocking forever... Wed, 24 Aug 2005 21:12:41 PDT http://code.analyticgal.com/articles/2005/06/13/rc2-performance-enhancements#comment-1 http://code.analyticgal.com/articles/2005/06/13/rc2-performance-enhancements#comment-1