Close and Dispose - which to call?

Question

Having read the threads Is SqlCommand.Dispose enough? and Closing and Disposing a WCF Service I am wondering for classes such as SqlConnection or one of the several classes

Answer 1

You DO need to call Dispose()!

Dispose() is for the developer to call, the Garbage Collector calls Finalize(). If you don't call Dispose() on your objects any unmanaged resources that they used won't be disposed until the garbage collector comes around and calls finalize on them (and who knows when that will happen).

This scenario is called Non Deterministic Finalization and is a common trap for .net developers. If you're working with objects that implement IDisposable then call Dispose() on them!

http://www.ondotnet.com/pub/a/oreilly/dotnet/news/programmingCsharp_0801.html?page=last

While there may be many instances (like on SqlConnection) where you call Disponse() on some object and it simply calls Close() on it's connection or closes a file handle, it's almost always your best bet to call Dispose()! unless you plan on reusing the object in the very near future.