Delphi for .NET Developer’s Guide

The Dispose Pattern—IDisposable

The dispose pattern gives developers an explicit mechanism to release unmanaged resources immediately rather than relying on a GC cycle. This is accomplished by implementing the IDisposable interface.

IDisposable Example

Consider the TCriticalSection class from the previous section. The following is its reworked definition that implements IDisposable:

TCriticalSection = class(TObject, IDisposable)
private
  FSection: TRTLCriticalSection;
  FCSValid: Boolean;
strict protected
    procedure Finalize; override;
public
  constructor Create;
  procedure Dispose;
end;

You should notice that the object now implements the IDisposable interface and its Dispose() procedure. Also, an FCSValid Boolean field will be initialized to False ...