Difference between dispose vs finalize

Briefly, the differences are as follows:

1. You never call the finalizer (or destructor as it's usually called in C#) directly. The system calls it just before it destroys the object and reclaims its memory.

2. In contrast the Dispose() method is always called from your code. Normally, a class will only have a Dispose() method if it holds references to unmanaged resources (file handles, database connections etc) which need cleaning up when the object is no longer needed. Such a class will typically implement the IDisposable interface and the pattern of coding which goes wih it. 

3. As they are not subject to garbage collection, structs can't have finalizers. Theoretically, they could implement IDisposable but this is unlikely in practice.

4. So you don't have to remember to call Dispose() 'manually', C# has a special construct, the 'using' statement, which does it for you.