IDisposable, does it really matter

Question

Coming from C/C++ a long time ago I still have a habit of ensuring that all resources are cleaned up correctly. I always ensure Dispose is called on IDisposable classes and impl

Answer 1

Yes, I've maxed out the number of Oracle cursors when looping over a connection object, for example, because I forgot to close the command reader - that was only 100 loops on a single connection too, and I needed to support that with possibly hundreds of connections doing it at the same time.

Your fellow developers should be taught to use the using() { ... } syntax if they can't be bothered to close up any unmanaged resources themselves. It is good practice anyways and you should use it too, since you yourself might be forgetting to put your Dispose() calls in a finally {} clause so as to truly clean up in the event of an unhandled exception being thrown.

If you can't win their hearts - change their minds - create tests that break their code by maxing out the resources that they're not cleaning up - and then show that the "fix" is simple and easy, and enables their code to be far more scalable. Or just show it to your boss and tell them this will enable him/her to sell the product as a new version with more scalability built in :) Your fellow developers will be instructed to do this all the time in the future, hopefully, and you'll be held in higher regard too.