Detaching a native socket from Boost.ASIO's socket class

Question

Is it possible to detach a native socket from Boost.ASIO's socket class? If so, how can it be done? I can't seem to find anything obvious in the documentation.

As a quick overview of what I'm trying to accomplish: I have a class that makes a connection and does some negotiation using Boost.ASIO, then passes back a native Windows SOCKET on success or 0 on failure.

Unless I'm mistaken, the native socket will be closed and deallocated when my boost::asio::basic_socket is destructed.

Answer 1

Answering my own question.

Windows has a WSADuplicateSocket function, which can be used to duplicate the native socket. The underlying socket will remain open until all descriptors for this socket are deallocated.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms741565(VS.85).aspx