Question

Naturally, BeginReceive() will never end if there’s no data.
MSDN suggests that calling Close() would abort BeginReceive().

However, calling Close() on the socket also performs a Dispose() on it, as figured out in this great answer, and consequently EndReceive() would throw an exception because the object is already disposed (and it does!).

How should I proceed?

Answer 1

It seems like this is by (the very dumb) design. You must have this exception thrown and caught in your code.

MSDN looks silent about it indeed, but if you look at the documentation of another asynchronous socket method, BeginConnect(), here’s what we find:

To cancel a pending call to the
BeginConnect() method, close the
Socket. When the Close() method is
called while an asynchronous operation
is in progress, the callback provided
to the BeginConnect() method is
called. A subsequent call to the
EndConnect(IAsyncResult) method will
throw an ObjectDisposedException to
indicate that the operation has been
cancelled.

If it is the proper way of doing for BeginConnect, it is probably so for BeginReceive as well. This is certainly a poor design on the part of Microsoft’s async API, because making the user necessarily throw and catch exception as a part of a normal flow would annoy the debugger. You have really no way to “wait” until the operation is completed, because Close() is what completes it in the first place.