Question

Reading about the Dispose pattern, I see the documentation repeatedly refer to “cleaning up managed and unmanaged code”. And in the canonical implementation of the Dispose method, I see specific flows (depending on whether disposing is true or false) dedicated to the cleanup of managed objects versus unmanaged objects.

But am I, the lowly newbie, to know which types are managed and which are unmanaged?

Answer 1

The short version is: anything that also implements IDisposable needs to be called in your Dispose method. FxCop will also tell you if you’re missing something (or not using IDisposable at all when you should be).