.net - Disposable singleton in C#

Question

I have a singleton that uses the "static readonly T Instance = new T();" pattern. However, I ran into a case where T is disposable, and actually needs to be disposed for unit tests. How can I modify this pattern to support a disposable singleton?

The interface I would like is something like:

var x = Foo.Instance;
var y = Foo.Instance; // x == y
...
x.Release(); // this causes the next Foo.Instance to return a fresh object
             // also, it assumes no further operations on x/y will be performed.

Note - the pattern has to be thread-safe, of course.

Edit - for the purpose of production code, this is a true singleton. The thing is that it locks some files, and so for cleanup in unit tests we have to dispose it.

I would also prefer a pattern that can be reused, if possible.

Answer 1

At that point I don't think I'd really consider it to be a singleton any more, to be honest.

In particular, if a client uses a singleton they're really not going to expect that they have to dispose of it, and they'd be surprised if someone else did.

What's your production code going to do?

EDIT: If you really, really need this for unit tests and only for unit tests (which sounds questionable in terms of design, to be frank) then you could always fiddle with the field using reflection. It would be nicer to work out whether it should really be a singleton or whether it should really be disposable though - the two very rarely go together.