Question

What is meant by connection.Dispose() in C#?

Answer 1

A class implements IDisposable interface contains a method called Dispose(), where you can release resources or do something else.

Also, a using statement can help to call Dispose() method automatically.

using (SqlConnection connection  = new SqlConnection(connStr))
{
   //do something
}// it will automatically Dispose() here

What happens when you call myClass.Dispose() depends on what you wrote in the Dispose method. For example:

public class MyClass : IDisposable
{
   //since MyClass implements IDisposable, it must contain a Dispose() method otherwise will compile error
   public void Dispose()
   {
      // do something
   }
}

so if you want to know what happened when you call connection.Dispose(), you must take a look at the Dispose() method of the class of connection(maybe it’s a SqlConnection?). If it’s a .NET built-in library(which means you can’t get the source code easily), you can use a tool to help called Reflector