How to close a blocked socket

Question

A windows service has an open socket that is receiving data (on a separate thread)

In response to the service OnShutdown I would like to signal worker thread to shutdown, but it's currently blocked on the Receive.

At the moment I'm timing out on the Receive to check if there is a stop request pending. Is there a better approach, rather than waiting on the timeout to notify the worker thread to stop receiving and go through its shutdown logic?

Answer 1

Calling Interrupt() on the thread should make it break out of any blocking operation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.threading.thread.interrupt.aspx

Note that this will cause a ThreadInterruptedException (when blocking), which you should handle appropriately.

Answer 2

Call Socket.Close. It will cause the Socket.Receive method to throw an exception unblocking it immediately.