Does PrincipalSearchResult automatically dispose all elements in its collection?

Question

Can\'t find anything in the MSDN documentation on this.

I.e. is it enough to do, say:

using(PrincipalSearcher searcher = ...)
{
    foreach (var prin         


        

Answer 1

Generally speacking, in many cases, not calling Dispose() will not cause big problems: well written disposable objects will implement the same logic needed to clean things up in the finalizer. (Disclaimer: I'm not saying "do not call dispose": it is there for a reason! For example, Finalization can happen a lot later. I'm only describing what are the consequences here).

However, AD objects are a notable exception; in particular, SearchResultCollection is known for suffering from this problem (references: MSDN (both the class docs and other articles), and Active Directory: Designing, Deploying, and Running Active Directory). It seems that for technical reasons it is not possible to release resources in its finalizer, so not calling dispose will lead to memory leaks.

As pointed out by Scott and Joe, many MSDN examples do not call dispose on the items in the collection; however, Ryan Dunn, former Windows Azure Technical Evangelist and co-author of the The .NET Developers Guide to Directory Services Programming, recommends to use to call dispose on each item in this blog post. From the post:

In general, always explicitly call Dispose() on the following object types:

• DirectoryEntry
• SearchResultCollection (from .FindAll())
• DirectorySearcher (if you have not explicitly set a SearchRoot)

This is the closest you can have to an "authoritative source", I believe; however my personal opinion is:

• if you can, do call dispose. It will not make any bad, especially if you can get back LINQ functionality with Joe's extension method
• go and use reflector/ilspy/ildasm AND/OR a memory profile like dotTrace to really see what is going on (basically, what Scott already did, but going deeper)