Good samples of using Finalizers in C#

Question

When I read a few articles about memory management in C#, I was confused by Finalizer methods.

There are so many complicated rules which related with them. For inst

Answer 1

There is an exhaustive discussion of Finalizer usage, with examples, here. Link courtesy of @SLaks at a related answer.

See also here for a more concise summary of when you need one (which is "not very often").

There's a nice prior answer here with another good real-world example.

To summarize with a pertinent extract:

Finalizers are needed to guarantee the release of scarce resources back into the operating system like file handles, sockets, kernel objects, etc.

For more correct real-world examples, browse around affected classes in the .Net Framework this MSDN search:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Search/en-US?query=%22.Finalize%22&ac=8

One valid reason I can think of when you might need to use a finalizer is if you wrap a third-party native code API in a managed wrapper, and the underlying native code API library requires the timely release of used operating system resources.