Safely disposing Excel interop objects in C#?

Question

i am working on a winforms c# visual studio 2008 application. the app talks to excel files and i am using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel; to do this.

i

Answer 1

First I will present a modified releaseObject, and then I will provide a pattern to use it.

using Marshal = System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal;
private void releaseObject(ref object obj) // note ref!
{
    // Do not catch an exception from this.
    // You may want to remove these guards depending on
    // what you think the semantics should be.
    if (obj != null && Marshal.IsComObject(obj)) {
        Marshal.ReleaseComObject(obj);
    }
    // Since passed "by ref" this assingment will be useful
    // (It was not useful in the original, and neither was the
    //  GC.Collect.)
    obj = null;
}

Now, a pattern to use:

private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    // Declare. Assign a value to avoid a compiler error.
    Excel.Application xlApp = null;
    Excel.Workbook xlWorkBook = null;
    Excel.Worksheet xlWorkSheet = null;

    try {
        // Initialize
        xlApp = new Excel.ApplicationClass();
        xlWorkBook = xlApp.Workbooks.Open(myBigFile, 0, true, 5, "", "", true, Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.XlPlatform.xlWindows, "\t", true, false, 0, true, 1, 0);
        // If the cast fails this like could "leak" a COM RCW
        // Since this "should never happen" I wouldn't worry about it.
        xlWorkSheet = (Excel.Worksheet)xlWorkBook.Worksheets.get_Item(1);
        ...
    } finally {
        // Release all COM RCWs.
        // The "releaseObject" will just "do nothing" if null is passed,
        // so no need to check to find out which need to be released.
        // The "finally" is run in all cases, even if there was an exception
        // in the "try". 
        // Note: passing "by ref" so afterwords "xlWorkSheet" will
        // evaluate to null. See "releaseObject".
        releaseObject(ref xlWorkSheet);
        releaseObject(ref xlWorkBook);
        // The Quit is done in the finally because we always
        // want to quit. It is no different than releasing RCWs.
        if (xlApp != null) {
            xlApp.Quit();
        }
        releaseObject(ref xlApp);    
    }
}

This simple approach can be extended/nested over most situations. I use a custom wrapper class that implements IDisposable to make this task easier.