Atomic Operations

There are two ways to handle pieces of code that need to be protected through mutual exclusion from other pieces of code.
1. Mutex Semaphores
2. Using "Critical Sections"

From your question I think the latter is more suitable for you. And there are two ways to use critical sections in windows NT.
1. By using the functions InitializeCriticalSection(), EnterCriticalSection(), LeaveCriticalSection()
2. By using the CCriticalSection and the CSingleLock or CMultiLock classes.

The first method is simple and straightforward, you initialize a so-called "critical-section" object somewhere in the initialization of your program, this object has no meaning in itself, but will be used in subsequent calls to EnterCriticalSection() and LeaveCriticalSection().

The second method is a bit more complicated but is more object-oriented. Using the second method, the class containing the critical section should include a data member of type CCriticalSection. Then in order to handle the controlled section, you should define a local variable of type CSingleLock (or CMultiLock if you want to wait on more than one CCriticalSection object). An example will show it best:

Assume class "List" has critical sections of code dealing with insertions and removals of items:

class List {
private:
    CCriticalSection Sync;
public:
    void Add() {
        CSingleLock SLock(&Sync);
        SLock.Lock();

              //{ critical section code }

        SLock.Unlock()
    }
...
};

Hope this helps.
Aviad.