Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform, Fifth Edition

8.8. Building Disposable Objects

As you have seen, finalizers can be used to release unmanaged resources when the garbage collector kicks in. However, given that many unmanaged objects are "precious items" (such as raw database or file handles), it may be valuable to release them as soon as possible instead of relying on a garbage collection to occur. As an alternative to overriding Finalize(), your class could implement the IDisposable interface, which defines a single method named Dispose():

public interface IDisposable
{

void Dispose();
}

If you are new to interface-based programming, Chapter 9 will take you through the details. In a nutshell, an interface is a collection of abstract members a class or structure may support. When you do support ...