Should “Dispose” only be used for types containing unmanaged resources?

Question

I was having a discussion with a colleague recently about the value of Dispose and types that implement IDisposable.

I think there is value

Answer 1

Short Answer: Absolutely NOT. If your type has members that are managed or unmanaged, you should implement IDisposable.

Now details: I've answered this question and provided much more detail on the internals of memory management and the GC on questions here on StackOverflow. Here are just a few:

• Is it bad practice to depend on the .NET automated garbage collector?
• What happens if I don't call Dispose on the pen object?
• Dispose, when is it called?

As far as best practices on the implementation of IDisposable, please refer to my blog post:

How do you properly implement the IDisposable pattern?