Ensuring that Dispose() gets called on your IDisposable types

31 May 2012

Here is a neat trick to make sure you IDisposable classes have their dispose method called. In the finalizer, call Debug.Fail and only include it in Debug builds:

  1. public class DisposableClass : IDisposable
  2. {
  3.     public void Dispose()
  4.     {
  5.         //The usual cleanup
  6. #if DEBUG
  7.         GC.SuppressFinalize(this);
  8. #endif
  9.      }
  11. #if DEBUG
  12.         ~DisposableClass()
  13.      {
  14.         Debug.Fail(string.Format("Undisposed {0}", GetType().Name));
  15.      }
  16. #endif
  17. }

This will give you an in-your-face dialog to let you know of your fail:

Assertion Failed

I can't claim that I came up with this, but I can't remember where I saw it either.