Skip to Main Content
C# in a Nutshell, Second Edition
book

C# in a Nutshell, Second Edition

by Peter Drayton, Ben Albahari, Ted Neward
August 2003
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
928 pages
32h 1m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from C# in a Nutshell, Second Edition

Name

WeakReference

Synopsis

This class encapsulates a weak reference to an object. By default, when you instantiate a .NET class, you create a strong reference, which prevents the garbage collector from removing the object and reclaiming memory. A weak reference, however, does not prevent an object from being released.

Objects that are weakly referenced can still be kept alive as long as there is at least one strong reference to them. That means a weak reference allows you to access an object as long as it is in use by another part of your application. For example, objects can be stored in a collection using a weak reference, but not kept alive just because they are in the collection.

To create a weakly referenced object, pass the name of the object to the WeakReference constructor. You can use the IsAlive property to check if the reference is valid, and the Target property to get a reference to the actual object. Assigning the Target property to another variable creates a strong reference.

You can set the TrackResurrection property to true in the constructor to maintain a long weak reference, which tracks an object during (or after) finalization.

public class WeakReference : System.Runtime.Serialization.ISerializable {
// Public Constructors
   public WeakReference(object target);
   public WeakReference(object target, bool trackResurrection);
// Protected Constructors
   protected WeakReference(System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationInfo info, System.Runtime.Serialization.StreamingContext ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

C# in a Nutshell

C# in a Nutshell

Ben Albahari, Ted Neward, Peter Drayton
C# 7.0 in a Nutshell

C# 7.0 in a Nutshell

Joseph Albahari, Ben Albahari
C# Cookbook, 2nd Edition

C# Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Jay Hilyard, Stephen Teilhet
C# Cookbook

C# Cookbook

Joe Mayo

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596005261Catalog PageErrata