Question

I have a rather short question about anonymous event handlers:

This is the code that I have:

public void AddTestControl(Control ctrl)
{
    ctrl.Disposed += (o, e) => { RemoveTestControl(ctrl); };
    ctrl.SomeEvent += _Control_SomeEvent;
}

public void RemoveTestControl(Control ctrl)
{
    ctrl.SomeEvent -= _Control_SomeEvent;
}

Is this code above fine, or should the code be rewritten in order to remove the Disposed Event Handler?
Something like this:

public void AddTestControl(Control ctrl)
{
    ctrl.Disposed += _Control_Disposed;
    ctrl.SomeEvent += _Control_SomeEvent;
}

public void RemoveTestControl(Control ctrl)
{
    ctrl.Disposed -= _Control_Disposed;
    ctrl.SomeEvent -= _Control_SomeEvent;
}

Answer 1

Generally, the only situation where you need to remove the event handlers from an object in order for it to be eligible for garbage collection is when the publisher object (the one defining the event) lives longer than the subscriber object (the one containing the event handlers). In such a situation the GC won’t be able to release the subscriber when it goes out of scope since it’s still being referenced by the publisher.

In this case, assuming this is WebForms or WinForms, the publisher (that is the Control object), is most likely a child object of the subscriber (probably a Page or a Form), which will be the first to go out of scope taking all its associated objects with it. Hence there’s no need to remove the event handlers.