Question

Say I have the following:

public abstract class ControlLimitBase : IDisposable 
{
}

public abstract class UpperAlarmLimit : ControlLimitBase 
{
}

public class CdsUpperAlarmLimit : UpperAlarmLimit 
{
}

Two Questions:

1.
I’m a little confused on when my IDisposable members would actually get called. Would they get called when an instance of CdsUpperAlarmLimit goes out of scope?

2.
How would I handle disposing of objects created in the CdsUpperAlarmLimit class? Should this also derive from IDisposable?

Answer 1

Dispose() is never called automatically – it depends on how the code is actually used.

1.) Dispose() is called when you specifically call Dispose():

myAlarm.Dispose();

2.) Dispose() is called at the end of a using block using an instance of your type.

using(var myAlarm = new CdsUpperAlarmLimit())
{

}

The using block is syntactic sugar for a try/finally block with a call to Dispose() on the object “being used” in the finally block.