Question

I’m sure there are answers out there … but googling on “C# using” is a bit more complicated than you may expect.

At any rate … just really started learning about this handy technique the other day and it seems like I would be foolish to not use it for any non-primitive objects I have in my code.

Is that a fairly accurate statement or are there some downsides (outside of the slightly more cluttered code) to using “using” for almost everything?

Answer 1

As others have mentioned, you can only use a using statement on types that implement IDisposable. For types that do implement IDisposable, the only real downside I have seen is due to the fact that using calls the type’s Dispose() method implicitly, so if an exception is thrown in that call, it is sometimes difficult to catch.

Otherwise, I would recommend using for types that implement IDisposable instead of utilizing try-catch-finally as it makes code more compact and clean.

Edit: found a good msdn article explaining this and other pitfalls.