What are finalisers for?

Question

I have been programming in .NET for four years (mostly C#) and I use IDiposable extensively, but I am yet to find a need for a finaliser. What are finalisers for?

Answer 1

Finalizers are for cleaning up resources if they were not disposed.

IE, nothing enforces that you ever call Dispose(), but Finalizers are called automatically by the garbage collector.

This functionality should not be relied upon, as there is no guarantee when (or if) garbage collection will get to your object.