What is the purpose of dispose method in .NET?

You might already know that garbage collector does automatic memory management and clean up of resources. But there is a limitation.

These unmanaged resources have to be released. Garbage collector gives you an option to release unmanaged resources by using Finalize method. This is implicitly called by the garbage collector before releasing an object and at that point, all unmanaged resources accessed by the object will be freed. Other than this, there is yet another option wherein the developer can explicitly release unmanaged resources. This is done using dispose method.

The dispose method is available in IDisposable interface and its signature is shown below:

public interface IDisposable {
void Dispose();
}

Consider that you have a text file called sample.txt and you prefer to read all lines of this text file using your C# program. For that, you will be using stream reader. Once the file is opened, read and then closed, you can release its memory using call to dispose method. This scenario is demonstrated below:

Content of sample.txt:

Now you attempt to create a C# program, read the contents of the file and release its memory. This is done using the code shown below:

class sampleClass {
public static void Main() {
StreamReader sampleReader = new StreamReader("sample.txt");
string eachLine;
Console.WriteLine(“Contents of sampleFile:”);
while ((eachLine = sampleReader.ReadLine()) != null) {
Console.WriteLine(eachLine);
}
sampleReader.Close();
sampleReader.Dispose();
}
}

Output of this code will be:

Contents of sampleFile:

This is a sample text file.
It is used to demonstrate usage of disposal method.
Enjoy reading it from your C# program.

In this program, you have explicitly called dispose method to perform the cleanup of StreamReader which handles the text file. C# provides a better solution wherein you will be using the statement “Using” in your code which will take care of automatic disposal of that resource.

Here is the modified example using the statement “Using”:

class sampleClass {
public static void Main() {
Using (StreamReader sampleReader = new StreamReader("sample.txt")) {
string eachLine;
Console.WriteLine(“Contents of sampleFile:”);
while ((eachLine = sampleReader.ReadLine()) != null) {
Console.WriteLine(eachLine);
}
}
}
}

This will give the same output and it also takes care of calling dispose method even if you have not explicitly called the method in the code shown above. When you compile this code, it will be internally converted into the code shown below:

class sampleClass {
public static void Main() {
StreamReader sampleReader = new StreamReader("sample.txt"));
try {
string eachLine;
Console.WriteLine(“Contents of sampleFile:”);
while ((eachLine = sampleReader.ReadLine()) != null) {
Console.WriteLine(eachLine);
}
}
finally {
sampleReader.Dispose();
}
}
}

The best way of implementing Dispose method is to use “Using” statement rather than explicitly calling the Dispose() method.

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