IDisposable: What Your Mother Never Told You About Resource Deallocation
A lot of the information regarding .NET internals in this article was gleaned from "CLR via C#", 2nd Ed., by Jeffrey Richter of Wintellect, Microsoft Press. If you don't already own it, buy it. Now. Seriously. It's an essential resource for any C# programmer.
This article is divided into two parts: the first part is an evaluation of many of the problems inherent with IDisposable, and the second part develops some "best practices" when writing IDisposable code.
During more than 20 years of coding, I have occasionally found it necessary to design my own small programming languages for certain tasks. These have varied from imperative scripting languages to a specialized regex for trees. There are many choices to make in language design: a few simple rules should never be broken, and there are many general guidelines. One of these guidelines is:
Guess which guideline the .NET runtime (and, by extension, every .NET language) does not follow? This article will examine some of the consequences of this choice, and then propose some best practices to try to work with this situation.
