Question

I’m getting in nerve between dispose and finalize. Here is my example code:

public class Car:IDisposable
    {
        public string name;
        public Car()
        {
            name = "My Car";
        }
        public void Dispose()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("This object has been disposed");
        }
    }
public static void Main()
        {
            Car anotherCar;
            using (var car = new Car())
            {
                anotherCar = car;
                Console.WriteLine("Before dispose. Name is: "+anotherCar.name);
            }

            Console.WriteLine("After dispose. Name is: "+anotherCar.name);

        }

The result is:

Before dispose. Name is My Car
This object has been disposed
After dispose. Name is My Car

My question is : because C# will automatically dispose object after using{}, so I think at line “After dispose”. anotherCar.name must be NULL. why it still be “My Car” ?

And my another question is : my book said that you shouldn’t use GC.Collect() for some reason and one of these is Performance. So, who dispose object ? If that is Garbage Collector,too so I think dipose() has the same performance issues with finalizer()

Thanks 🙂

Answer 1

I think you are misunderstanding what Dispose actually does. It doesn’t destroy your object, set anything to null, or otherwise perform any sort of magic. When you use the using statement, that just guarantees that Dispose will be called. What you do in your Dispose method is what determines the behavior of your object. Not the language or .NET framework.