Why would try/finally rather than a “using” statement help avoid a race condition?

Question

This question relates to a comment in another posting here: Cancelling an Entity Framework Query

I will reproduce the code example from there for clarity:

Answer 1

Depending on whether you use using or explicitly try/finally you can have slightly different code using the sample code you will have

    AdventureWorks2008R2Entities entities = null;
    try // Don't use using because it can cause race condition
    {
        entities = new AdventureWorks2008R2Entities();
        ...
    } finally {
    } 

substituting that with a using statement it could look like

   using(var entities = new AdventureWorks2008R2Entities()){
      ...
   }

which accordig do §8.13 of the specification will be expanded to

    AdventureWorks2008R2Entities entities = new AdventureWorks2008R2Entities();
    try
    {
        ...
    } finally {
    } 

Therefor the only real difference is that the assignment is not within the try/finally block but that has no consequence on which race conditions could occur (aside from thread abort inbetween the assignement and the try block as Hans also notes)