Is it important to dispose SolidBrush and Pen?

Question

I recently came across this VerticalLabel control on CodeProject.

I notice that the OnPaint method creates but doesn\'t dispose Pen and SolidBrush objects.

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Answer 1

Of course it does matter. It is important to dispose all instances of classes that implement IDisposable when they are no longer needed. Classes are defined IDisposable when they make use of unmanaged resources, that is, operating system resources that are not handled by the .NET Framework.

If you don't manually dispose the objects, then these unmanaged resources will not be freed until the garbage collector invokes the object finalizer (and this will only happen if the class has properly implemented the Dispose pattern), which may be very late since the garbage collector only runs when it detects an actual memory shortage. Thus when not disposing objects, you are retaining operating system resources that could otherwise be used by other applications.

A discussion on this subject can be found here: http://agilology.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-dispose-is-necessary-and-other.html