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

The most justifiable use case for disposal of managed resources, is preparation for the GC to reclaim resources that would otherwise never be collected.

A prime example is circular references.

Whilst it's best practice to use patterns that avoid circular references, if you do end up with (for example) a 'child' object that has a reference back to its 'parent', this can stop GC collection of the parent if you just abandon the reference and rely on GC - plus if you have implemented a finalizer, it'll never be called.

The only way round this is to manually break the circular references by setting the Parent references to null on the children.

Implementing IDisposable on parent and children is the best way to do this. When Dispose is called on the Parent, call Dispose on all Children, and in the child Dispose method, set the Parent references to null.