C# 4.0 Unleashed

Implementing IDisposable

You haven’t seen how to declare a type or implement an interface just yet, but it is very simple to understand. To create an IDisposable type, you write something like this:

class MyResource : IDisposable /* this means we're implementing IDisposable */{    // Useful members go here.    public void Dispose()    {        // Do some disposal operation here.    }}

Things are a bit more complicated, though, because you typically want the underlying resources to get deallocated even if the Dispose method is not called (because of a type’s user screwing up, for example). This is where the use of a finalizer comes in. We detail the concept of a finalizer when talking about classes, but put simply, it gets called by the garbage ...