How does the CLR find the classes which implement IDisposable?

Question

I need some clarification on…

1. … how the CLR — more specifically, the garbage collector — finds the classes which implement the IDisposable interface; and

2. … how it calls the Dispose method (of all classes which implement the IDisposable interface) to free up memory?

Answer 1

The CLR does not call Dispose(), this is up to user code to call either directly or through the use of the using statement. The CLR will however call finalizers , although this is not gauranteed.

Answer 2

Dispose is not called automatically. The compiler generates calls to Dispose when you write using , or call Dispose directly.