Question

I’m writing a program which listens to an incoming TcpClient and handles data when it arrives. The Listen() method is run on a separate thread within the component, so it needs to be threadsafe. If I break out of a do while loop while I’m within a lock() statement, will the lock be released? If not, how do I accomplish this?

Thanks!

(Any other advice on the subject of Asynchronous TCP Sockets is welcome as well.)

private void Listen()
{
    do
    {
        lock (_clientLock)
        {
            if (!_client.Connected) break;
            lock (_stateLock)
            {
                if (!_listening) break;
                if (_client.GetStream().DataAvailable) HandleData();
            }
        }
        Thread.Sleep(0);
    } while (true);
}

Answer 1

Yes. The lock statement translates into a try/finally clause. In C# 4, for example, a lock statement like so:

lock(obj)
{
    // body
}

roughly translates (taken from Eric Lippert’s blog here) to:

bool lockWasTaken = false;
var temp = obj;
try 
{ 
    Monitor.Enter(temp, ref lockWasTaken); 
    { 
       // body 
    }
}
finally 
{ 
    if (lockWasTaken) 
        Monitor.Exit(temp); 
}

When the execution leaves the scope of the lock {}, the underlying lock will be released automatically. This will happen no matter how you exit scope (break/return/etc), since the call to Monitor.Exit is wrapped, internally, inside of the finally block of a try/finally.