Destructor vs IDisposable?

Question

I've read about disposing objects/IDisposable interface and destructors in C#, but to me they seem to do the same thing?

What is the difference between the two? Why would I use one over the other? In fact, in this example (link below) this code uses both the IDisposable interface and a destructor:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.idisposable.aspx

The comment says the destructor is if the finalization code is not used, but how do I decide when to use one over the other?

Answer 1

I wrote a fairly in-depth post which should help to explain about finalizers, IDisposable, and when you should use one or the other: http://gregbee.ch/blog/implementing-and-using-the-idisposable-interface

Probably the most relevant part is quoted below:

When you are using unmanaged resources such as handles and database connections, you should ensure that they are held for the minimum amount of time, using the principle of acquire late and release early. In C++ releasing the resources is typically done in the destructor, which is deterministically run at the point where the object is deleted. The .NET runtime, however, uses a garbage collector (GC) to clean up and reclaim the memory used by objects that are no longer reachable; as this runs on a periodic basis it means that the point at which your object is cleaned up is nondeterministic. The consequence of this is that destructors do not exist for managed objects as there is no deterministic place to run them.

Instead of destructors, C# has finalizers which are implemented by overriding the Finalize method defined on the base Object class (though C# somewhat confusingly uses the C++ destructor syntax ~Object for this). If an object overrides the Finalize method then rather than being collected by the GC when it is out of scope, the GC places it on a finalizer queue. In the next GC cycle all finalizers on the queue are run (on a single thread in the current implementation) and the memory from the finalized objects reclaimed. It's fairly obvious from this why you don't want to do clean up in a finalizer: it takes two GC cycles to collect the object instead of one and there is a single thread where all finalizers are run while every other thread is suspended, so it's going to hurt performance.

So if you don't have destructors, and you don't want to leave the cleanup to the finalizer, then the only option is to manually, deterministically, clean up the object. Enter the IDisposable interface which provides a standard for supporting this functionality and defines a single method, Dispose, where you put in the cleanup logic for the object. When used within a finally block, this interface provides equivalent functionality to destructors. The reason for finally blocks in code is primarily to support the IDisposable interface; this is why C++ uses simply try/except as there is no need for a finally block with destructors.