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

8.7. Building Finalizable Objects

In Chapter 6, you learned that the supreme base class of .NET, System.Object, defines a virtual method named Finalize(). The default implementation of this method does nothing whatsoever:

// System.Object
public class Object
{
  ...
  protected virtual void Finalize() {}
}

When you override Finalize() for your custom classes, you establish a specific location to perform any necessary cleanup logic for your type. Given that this member is defined as protected, it is not possible to directly call an object's Finalize() method from a class instance via the dot operator. Rather, the garbage collector will call an object's Finalize() method (if supported) before removing the object from memory.

NOTE

It is illegal to ...