Question

Possible Duplicates:
Is it possible to have a memory leak in managed code? (specifically C# 3.0)
Memory Leak in C#

There was a similar question on this yesterday, but for Java, so I’m interested – what it takes to create a memory leak in C# / .NET (without using unsafe) ?

Answer 1

static events; DEADLY, since they never go out of scope.

static event EventHandler Evil;

for(int i = 0 ; i < 1000000 ; i++)
    Evil += delegate {};

The anonymous method is simply a nice-to-have here but are nice because they also are a pig to unsubscribe unless you take a copy into a variable/field and subscribe that.

Technically this isn’t actually “leaked”, as you can still access them via Evil.GetInvocationList() – however, when used with regular objects this can cause unexpected object lifetimes, i.e.

MyHeavyObject obj = ...
...
SomeType.SomeStaticEvent += obj.SomeMethod;

now the object at obj lives forever. This satisfies enough of a perceived leak IMO, and “my app died a horrible death” is good enough for me ;p