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asp.netvb.netfinalizer

Dispose & Finalize for collections of properties?

I'm looking at some vb.net code I just inherited, and cannot fathom why the original developer would do this.

Basically, each "Domain" class is a collection of properties. And each one implements IDisposable.Dispose, and overrides Finalize(). There is no base class, so each just extents Object.

Dispose sets each private var to Nothing, or calls _private.Dispose when the property is another domain object. There's a private var that tracks the disposed state, and the final thing in Dispose is GC.suppressFinalize(Me)

Finalize just calls Me.Dispose and MyBase.Finalize.

Is there any benefit to this? Any harm? There are no un-managed resources, no db connections, nothing that would seem to need this.

Solution

  • That strikes me as being a VB6 pattern.

    I would bet the guy was coming straight from VB6, maybe in the earlier days of .NET when these patterns were not widely understood.

    There also is one case were setting an nternal reference to nothing is useful in a call to Dispose: when the member is marked as Withevents. Without that, you risk having an uncollected object handling events when it really should not be doing that anymore.