Question

Firstly, am new to C# programming.
I have created a dedicated class to get the connection string from the app.config of a Web Services application in Visual Studio 2010 as per the code below.

On building the code I get the following error via the catch block:

“The name ‘connection’ does not exist in the current context”.

Obviously connection is going out of scope.

1. How do I avoid this error?
2. Is the Dispose method being used correctly here?

---

public class FCSConnection : IDisposable
{
    public string GetDefaultConnectionString()
    {   
        string DefaultConnectionString = null;
        try
        {
            DefaultConnectionString = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["ConnectionString"];
            SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection(DefaultConnectionString);
            connection.Open();
            return DefaultConnectionString;
        }
        catch (Exception)
        {
            if (DefaultConnectionString != null)
            {
                connection.Dispose();
            }
        }
        return DefaultConnectionString;
    }

    public void Dispose()
    {
        throw new NotImplementedException();
    }        
}

Answer 1

public class FCSConnection : IDisposable
{
    private SqlConnection connection = null;

    public string GetDefaultConnectionString()
    {   
        string defaultConnectionString = null;
        try
        {
            defaultConnectionString = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["ConnectionString"];
            connection = new SqlConnection(defaultConnectionString);
            connection.Open(); // are you sure want to keep the connection being opened??
        }
        catch
        {
            Dispose();
        }
        return defaultConnectionString;
    }

    public void Dispose()
    {
        if (connection != null)
        {
            connection.Dispose();
            connection = null; // to avoid repeat dispose
        }
    }        
}