Garbage collector for unmanaged resources.

Question

Hello Do we need use garbage collector every time when we create unmanaged resources? Thank s.

Senthilkumar · Answer

Hi, The Garbage collection has implemented to manage the auto memory management of manage code, basically it handles the code which runs under the environment of CLR. garbage collector knows about all managed resources, at some point in time the GC will come along and clean up all the memory and resources associated with a managed object. The GC does not know about unmanaged resources, such as files, stream and handles, so if you do not clean them up explicitly in your code then you will end up with memory leaks and locked resources. I suggest you to go through this example will give more idea about cleaning up unmanaged resources. http://www.gibmonks.com/c_sharp/csharpckbk2-CHP-3-SECT-31.html

Vulpes · Answer

The garbage collector only cleans up managed resources. If your class uses unmanaged resources, then you should implement the IDisposable interface. You can then call the Dispose() method to clean up the unmanaged resources immediately. There is in fact a pattern which you can use for this purpose. Check out: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.idisposable.aspx

Garbage collector for unmanaged resources.

Answers (2)