I'd like to open a discussion of when to use IDispose (a quick search of the archives shows that this has not been discussed recently).
It is my theory that this idiom will be vastly overused. I'll start by quoting Richter: "In general, I strongly discourage the use of calling a Dispose or Close method...When application code calls Dispose or Close it is effectively saying that it knows when the application no longer has a need for the object. For many applications, it is impossible to know for sure when an object is no longer required." (Richter, chapter 19, Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming (Microsoft Press, 2002). It is his last sentence that I want to pick up on and discuss. I suspect that (a) the ability of the GC to do the job is greatly underestimated and (b) the need to use close is therefore greatly overestimated while (c) the risk of calling Dispose is greatly underestimated It seems to me that if your object is (or might be) passed to ANY method calling Close is very risky. You simply can't know if other objects have a reference to it, and you certainly don't want to keep track. The only place it does make sense to me to use this idiom is when a) the object is created in a very controlled situation (a single method) and does not leave that method b) the object contains a very limited resource c) you know when you are done with the object d) you are making a LOT of instances In any case, I write all this to spark conversation on this issue. Thanks. ------------------------------- Jesse Liberty, President Liberty Associates, Inc. .NET Programming and Training http://www.LibertyAssociates.com You can read messages from the Advanced DOTNET archive, unsubscribe from Advanced DOTNET, or subscribe to other DevelopMentor lists at http://discuss.develop.com.
