Proper use of the IDisposable interface

Question

I know from reading the Microsoft documentation that the \"primary\" use of the IDisposable interface is to clean up unmanaged resources.

To me, \"unman

Answer 1

Apart from its primary use as a way to control the lifetime of system resources (completely covered by the awesome answer of Ian, kudos!), the IDisposable/using combo can also be used to scope the state change of (critical) global resources: the console, the threads, the process, any global object like an application instance.

I've written an article about this pattern: http://pragmateek.com/c-scope-your-global-state-changes-with-idisposable-and-the-using-statement/

It illustrates how you can protect some often used global state in a reusable and readable manner: console colors, current thread culture, Excel application object properties...