CA1001 : Implement Idisposable in a ViewModel

Question

  public void Dispose()
        {
            Dispose(true);
            GC.SuppressFinalize(this);
        }

        protected virtual void Dispose(bool disposing)
        {
            if (disposing)
            {

                if (processFileBackgroundWorker != null)
                {
                    processFileBackgroundWorker.Dispose();
                    processFileBackgroundWorker = null;
                }
            }
        }

I am using a background worker in my view model, and I get the CA1001 error in fxcop. I understand that I need to inherit from Idisposable, and implement the above interface. I am more just curious as to how this works and if simply adding in this code arbitrarily in my class will accomplish anything. I tried setting a break point and this code is never called or utilized, and I would appreciate any guidance in how to properly implement it.

Answer 1

If fxcop pounds its spoon on the tray and demands IDisposable, and it's not an option to get rid of fxcop, I guess you're stuck paying your taxes.

It's a bit silly in this particular case, because IDisposable is for disposing unmanaged resources when an object goes out of the scope of a using block or a try/catch, and viewmodels don't go out of scope in that way. So in normal viewmodel usage, nothing calls Dispose().

But you do often discard them before program exit (at program exit, nobody cares if anything gets disposed -- it's all going straight in the dumpster). I would implement IDisposable, make it correctly dispose of the BackgroundWorker as you're doing, and if there is a point in your code where an instance of that viewmodel is discarded, I would explicitly call Dispose() on it. You don't need IDisposable for that, but it's harmless.