Question

I’m reading about destructors in C# but I’m having trouble finding a decent use-case for it.

Could someone provide an example of usage with an explanation?

Much, much appreciated.

Update
The code sample in the book implements both a Desctuctor and a Dispose() method, see this code snippet from the book.

class MyClass
{
    bool disposed = false; // Disposal status
    public void Dispose()
    {
        Dispose(true);
        GC.SuppressFinalize(this);
    }
    ~MyClass()
    {
        Dispose(false);
    }
    protected virtual void Dispose(bool disposing)
    {
        if (disposed == false)
        {
            if (disposing == true)
            {
                // Dispose the managed resources. Factored Dispose

            }
            // Dispose the unmanaged resources.

        }
        disposed = true;
    }
}

Marko

Answer 1

Finalizers are very rarely needed now. They used to be required when you had direct access to native resources – but now you should usually be using SafeHandle instead.

Joe Duffy has an excellent post about this which goes into rather more details than I would be able to write myself – so go read it 🙂

A quick note on terminology: the ECMA version of the C# spec refers to them as finalizers; the Microsoft version of the spec has always referred to them as destructors and continues to do so.