How to make ObservableCollection thread-safe?

As of .net framwork 4.5 you can use native collection synchronization.

BindingOperations.EnableCollectionSynchronization(YourCollection, YourLockObject);

YourLockObject is instance of any object e.g. new Object();. Use one per collection.

This eliminates the need of some special class or anything. Just enable and enjoy ;)

[edit] As stated in the comments by Mark and Ed (thanks for clarifying!), this does not relieve you from locking the collection on updates as it just synchonizes the collection-view-binding and does not magically make the collection thread-safe itself. [/edit]

PS: BindingOperations resides in Namespace System.Windows.Data.

The solution Franck posted here will work in the case where one thread is adding things, but ObservableCollection itself (and List, which it's based on) are not thread-safe. If multiple threads are writing to the collection, hard-to-track-down bugs could be introduced. I wrote a version of ObservableCollection that uses a ReaderWriteLockSlim to be truly thread-safe.

Unfortunately, it hit the StackOverflow character limit, so here it is on PasteBin. This should work 100% with multiple readers/writers. Just like regular ObservableCollection, it's invalid to modify the collection in a callback from it (on the thread that received the callback).

You can create a simple thread friendly version of the observable collection. Like the following :

 public class MTObservableCollection<T> : ObservableCollection<T>
    {
        public override event NotifyCollectionChangedEventHandler CollectionChanged;
        protected override void OnCollectionChanged(NotifyCollectionChangedEventArgs e)
        {
            NotifyCollectionChangedEventHandler CollectionChanged = this.CollectionChanged;
            if (CollectionChanged != null)
                foreach (NotifyCollectionChangedEventHandler nh in CollectionChanged.GetInvocationList())
                {
                    DispatcherObject dispObj = nh.Target as DispatcherObject;
                    if (dispObj != null)
                    {
                        Dispatcher dispatcher = dispObj.Dispatcher;
                        if (dispatcher != null && !dispatcher.CheckAccess())
                        {
                            dispatcher.BeginInvoke(
                                (Action)(() => nh.Invoke(this,
                                    new NotifyCollectionChangedEventArgs(NotifyCollectionChangedAction.Reset))),
                                DispatcherPriority.DataBind);
                            continue;
                        }
                    }
                    nh.Invoke(this, e);
                }
        }
    }

with that now do a massive find & replace and change all your ObservableCollection to MTObservableCollection and your good to go