Does Form.Dispose() call controls inside's Dispose()?

Question

When I create a Form, the auto-generated code doesn't include an overrided Dispose method. Does that mean Dispose is not being called for all the controls in the form?

Answer 1

When you call Dispose on the form, it will call Dispose for each control in its Controls collection. Those controls will in turn do the same, so in the end all controls' Dispose method should have been invoked. Note that this is not based on whether the controls are present in the designer or not; it is based on what control instances that are found in the Controls collection of the form at the time the call to Dispose is done.

The only case when I could see that this would not happen is if you create some container control yourself and override Dispose without propagating the call either to the base class or iterate over the contained controls and call Dispose on them.

Answer 2

It should. You might have to look in the YourForm.designer.cs file. It will look like this:

protected override void Dispose(bool disposing)
{
   if(disposing && (components != null))
   {
      components.Dispose();
   }
   base.Dispose(disposing)
}

The base.Dispose(); call will take care of cleaning up the controls added to the Form.