Question

Greetings, I’m trying to find a way to ‘unbind’ a socket from a particular IP/Port combination. My pseudocode looks like this:

ClassA a = new ClassA(); //(class A  instantiates socket and binds it to 127.0.0.1:4567)  //do something  //...much later, a has been garbage-collected away. ClassA aa = new ClassA(); //crash here. 

At this point, .Net informs me that I’ve already got a socket bound to 127.0.0.1:4567, which is technically true. But no matter what code I put in ClassA’s destructor, or no matter what functions I call on the socket (I’ve tried .Close() and .Disconnect(true)), the socket remains proudly bound to 127.0.0.1:4567. What do I do to be able to ‘un-bind’ the socket?

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EDIT: I’m not relying solely on garbage collection (though I tried that approach as well). I tried calling a.Close() or a.Disconnect() and only then instantiating aa; this doesn’t solve the problem.

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EDIT: I’ve also tried implementing IDisposable, but the code never got there without my calling the method (which was the equivalent of earlier attempts, as the method would simply try .Close and .Disconnect). Let me try calling .Dispose directly and get back to you.

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EDIT (lots of edits, apologies): Implementing IDisposable and calling a.Dispose() from where ‘a’ loses scope doesn’t work – my Dispose implementation still has to call either .Close or .Disconnect(true) (or .Shutdown(Both)) but none of those unbind the socket.

Any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

(this is what finally got everything to work for me)

Make sure EVERY socket that the socket in A connects to has

socket.SetSocketOption(SocketOptionLevel.Socket,SocketOptionName.ReuseAddress, true); 

set upon being initiated.