Importants of disposing of objects

Apocolypse2005 · March 2nd, 2009, 05:36 AM

How important is it ot dispose of objects when finished with them, as it does free up resources but will it actually increase performance?

dparsons · March 4th, 2009, 01:00 PM

It is good practice to never rely on the Garbage Collector (GC) to clean up your objects for you. Not only will this improve the preformance of your application over it can help prevent strange errors when dealing with, for example, I/O operations.

A good example of why you should do this would be sending an email with an attachment from the local file system. When you call this line of code:

mailMsgObj.Attachments.Add(new Attachment(somefile))

A lock is actually going to be placed on the file that is specificed in 'somefile' and this lock will remain in place until mailMsgObj.Dispose() is called to release the resource.

To avoid calling Dispose() on all of my objects I prefer using statements such as:

vb Code:

Using <someObject>
End Using

csharp Code:

using(<someobject>)
{
}

Once execution has passed outside the scope of the using block your objects will be destroyed.

hth.
-Doug

Apocolypse2005 · March 11th, 2009, 11:18 AM

So if i wasn't using the using statement then i should do

Code:

someobject.Dispose()

dparsons · March 11th, 2009, 11:25 AM

Yes. Provided the object exposes a Dispose method of course.

hth.
-Doug