Question

I’ve noticed that the majority of the example code using .NET’s SmtpClient class don’t Dispose the created object or wrap it in an using block. (e.g. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.mail.smtpclient.aspx) Is the SmtpClient’s dispose optional or not very important or are the examples leading us down the wrong path? Note: In the MSDN example provided above the MailMessage is disposed but not the SmtpClient object.

Answer 1

The reason that a lot of examples online don’t show proper disposing code is that SmtpClient didn’t implement IDisposable until .NET 4. So the examples could be based on a previous framework, or written by someone unfamiliar with the new functionality.