Releasing Unmanaged Resources and Ensuring Dispose Calling

Resource management is essential in C# programming. Constructors are vital for setting up objects and managing different types of resources, including unmanaged ones that need manual disposal. We will explore constructors, finalizers, and the IDisposable interface, giving us the skills to effectively handle resource allocation and release in our C# applications.

Releasing unmanaged resources

Constructors can be used to initialize fields, a type may have multiple constructors. Imagine that a constructor allocates an unmanaged resource, that is, anything that is not controlled by .NET, such as a file or mutex, under the operating system's control. The unmanaged resource must be manually released because .NET cannot do it for us using its automatic garbage collection feature.

Garbage collection

Garbage collection is an advanced topic, so for this topic, we will use some code examples. Each type can have a single finalizer that will be called by the .NET runtime when the resources need to be released. A finalizer has the same name as a constructor, that is, the name of the type, but it is prefixed with a tilde, ~, as shown in the following code: