Why we don't have IsDisposed property in IDisposable interface [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
How does one tell if an IDisposable object reference is disposed?

Is there a method to check if object has been disposed different then

try
{
    myObj.CallRandomMethod();
} catch (ObjectDisposedException e)
{
    // now I know object has been disposed
}

In my case I'm using TcpClient class that has Close() method which disposes object and this can happen in piece of code I don't have control of. In this case I would like to have better solution then catching exception.

Answer 1

The reliable solution is catching the ObjectDisposedException.

The solution to write your overridden implementation of the Dispose method doesn't work, since there is a race condition between the thread calling Dispose method and the one accessing to the object: after having checked the hypothetic IsDisposed property , the object could be really disposed, throwing the exception all the same.

Another approach could be exposing a hypothetic event Disposed (like this), which is used to notify about the disposing object to every object interested, but this could be difficoult to plan depending on the software design.

Answer 2

A good way is to derive from TcpClient and override the Disposing(bool) method:

class MyClient : TcpClient {
    public bool IsDead { get; set; }
    protected override void Dispose(bool disposing) {
        IsDead = true;
        base.Dispose(disposing);
    }
}

Which won't work if the other code created the instance. Then you'll have to do something desperate like using Reflection to get the value of the private m_CleanedUp member. Or catch the exception.

Frankly, none is this is likely to come to a very good end. You really did want to write to the TCP port. But you won't, that buggy code you can't control is now in control of your code. You've increased the impact of the bug. Talking to the owner of that code and working something out is by far the best solution.

EDIT: A reflection example:

using System.Reflection;
public static bool SocketIsDisposed(Socket s)
{
   BindingFlags bfIsDisposed = BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.GetProperty;
   // Retrieve a FieldInfo instance corresponding to the field
   PropertyInfo field = s.GetType().GetProperty("CleanedUp", bfIsDisposed);
   // Retrieve the value of the field, and cast as necessary
   return (bool)field.GetValue(s, null);
}