Proper use of the IDisposable interface

Question

I know from reading the Microsoft documentation that the \"primary\" use of the IDisposable interface is to clean up unmanaged resources.

To me, \"unman

Answer 1

I see a lot of answers have shifted to talk about using IDisposable for both managed and unmanaged resources. I'd suggest this article as one of the best explanations that I've found for how IDisposable should actually be used.

https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/29534/IDisposable-What-Your-Mother-Never-Told-You-About

For the actual question; should you use IDisposable to clean up managed objects that are taking up a lot of memory the short answer would be no. The reason is that once you Dispose of an IDisposable you should be letting it go out of scope. At that point any referenced child objects are also out of scope and will get collected.

The only real exception to this would be if you have a lot of memory tied up in managed objects and you've blocked that thread waiting for some operation to complete. If those objects where not going to be needed after that call completed then setting those references to null might allow the garbage collector to collect them sooner. But that scenario would represent bad code that needed to be refactored - not a use case of IDisposable.