Determinism in Dispose and Finalize Execution Timing
I get a surprising number of questions about when objects are disposed or collected. Usually people will have some limited logic to cleanup their objects (releasing file handles, removing references to large objects, etc.), and they don’t know when this logic will execute. Here is a little bit of insight into when objects are disposed and finalized. (If you are looking for more information about Disposable and Finalizable patterns, check this post)
When Does Dispose Execute?
The Dispose method on an object is only executed when it is called by the application. What I mean by that, is the CLR does not automatically call Dispose on your objects. If you don’t call dispose, it can result in a memory leak that does not get cleaned up until the process exits.
This doesn’t mean you necessarily have to call Dispose() explicitly. In C#, there are a number of times that Dispose() is called implicitly:
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