Dealing with .NET IDisposable objects

Question

I work in C#, and I\'ve been pretty lax about using using blocks to declare objects that implement IDisposable, which you\'re apparently always suppose

Answer 1

@Atario, not only the accepted answer is wrong, your own edit is as well. Imagine the following situation (that actually occurred in one CTP of Visual Studio 2005):

For drawing graphics, you create pens without disposing them. Pens don't require a lot of memory but they use a GDI+ handle internally. If you don't dispose the pen, the GDI+ handle will not be released. If your application isn't memory intensive, quite some time can pass without the GC being called. However, the number of available GDI+ handles is restricted and soon enough, when you try to create a new pen, the operation will fail.

In fact, in Visual Studio 2005 CTP, if you used the application long enough, all fonts would suddenly switch to “System”.

This is precisely why it's not enough to rely on the GC for disposing. The memory usage doesn't necessarily corelate with the number of unmanaged resources that you acquire (and don't release). Therefore, these resoures may be exhausted long before the GC is called.

Additionally, there's of course the whole aspects of side-effects that these resources may have (such as access locks) that prevent other applications from working properly.