Question

So, as a new .NET programmer I thought that the garbage collector would clean up my mess for me all the time.

Now, a year and a half later I am getting out of memory exceptions in that code I wrote when I did not know that I had to call dispose on some resources. I am guessing that is because that code allocats a lot of bitmaps that don’t get disposed…

I have gone through the code to clean these up now that I know better. But I keep missing some. Is there a tool or setting that can see IDisposables not getting disposed?

While I can see the simple cases being easy to catch by compiler or tool, I can also see some more complex scenarios being very hard to catch. So if there is no tool I understand and will keep doing it by hand.

Answer 1

Take a look at FxCop. One of its rules will catch items that implement IDisposable, where Dispose() wasn’t called.