What are the most common (and often overlooked) causes of memory leaks in managed (.net) applications?

Question

Please can anyone recommend a quick checklist / best practice guide to help us avoid simple (but subtle) mistakes that cause could cause memory leaks in .net apps

I find

Answer 1

Memory leaks can come from a variety of sources.

• You registered an event but forgot to unregister that event.

• Files/connections were opened but not closed properly.

• The Dispose() call was not implemented properly.

• The Dispose() call was bypassed somehow; for example, an exception was encountered in between.

• You encountered a deadlock (which may result in not releasing root objects).

• The finalizer thread is blocked; for example, the STA thread for the COM object is not available.

• There are leaks from unmanaged code.

• An object’s lifetime is too high.

• There is a circular reference.

• Leaks can come from the .NET Runtime environment (on rare occasions).

• Leaks may also appear from your testing framework. (In that case, it is a test leak, not a development environment leak, and test engineers are responsible for resolving it.)