Bad practice? Non-canon usage of c#'s using statement

Question

C# has the using statement, specifically for IDisposable objects. Presumably, any object specified in the using statement will hold some sort of re

Answer 1

I'd say it's acceptable - in fact, I've used it in some projects where I wanted to have an action triggered at the end of a specific code block.

Wes Deyer used it in his LINQ to ASCII Art program, he called it action disposable (Wes works on the C# compiler team - I'd trust his judgment :D):

http://blogs.msdn.com/wesdyer/archive/2007/02/23/linq-to-ascii-art.aspx

class ActionDisposable: IDisposable
{
    Action action;

    public ActionDisposable(Action action)
    {
        this.action = action;
    }

    #region IDisposable Members

    public void Dispose()
    {
        this.action();
    }

    #endregion
}

Now you can return that from a function, and do something like this:

using(ExtendedConsoleWriter.Indent())
{
     ExtendedConsoleWriter.Write("This is more indented");
}

ExtendedConsoleWriter.Write("This is less indented");