Recently, my colleague was investigating an interesting issue. A ReaderWriterLockSlim was sometimes throwing the following exception when releasing a read lock.

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System.Threading.SynchronizationLockException: 'The read lock is being released without being held.'

The code looked fairly straightforward and it should have worked properly, but after some meditation on the mysteries of C# and the universe, he noticed something interesting. An await call between taking the lock and releasing it.

Roughly, the problematic code had the following pattern:

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var rwl = new ReaderWriterLockSlim();
rwl.EnterReadLock();

//doing stuff

await Task.Delay(1000); //an async call with 'await'

//doing some more stuff

rwl.ExitReadLock();

A suspicion was confirmed by looking at the reference implementation of ReaderWriterLockSlim - a field that tracks the amount of locks taken is defined like this:

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[ThreadStatic]
private static ReaderWriterCount t_rwc;

The lock taking code looks like this (omitting some code for clarity):

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private bool TryEnterReadLockCore(TimeoutTracker timeout) 
{
  //some code
  lrwc = GetThreadRWCount(false); //get read/write lock count PER THREAD
  //some more code
  lrwc.readercount++;
  //even more code
}

That was enough to understand what was the issue. Using async/await yields current thread until the async method finishes execution and then fetches another thread from the thread pool to continue execution - and since ReaderWriterLockSlim uses ThreadStatic to store the counts of read/write locks, no wonder it thinks the lock was never taken after async/await call!

The solution in such cases is either removing usage of async/await or utilizing a different set of synchronization primitives that are compatible with thread yields resulting from await calls.
There is excellent series of blog posts on the topic by Stephen Toub, where he shows how async-compatible synchronization primitives can be implemented. The first blog post you can find here.
Also, check out AsyncEx - a very handy library with full set of async-compatible synchronization primitives, so you don’t have to implement your own.