How can I find out what is preventing garbage collection of an object?

Question

Some of my objects are not being garbage collected, I need to find out where the references to the object are and what is preventing the garbage collection.

I'm using Visual Studio Express.

Answer 1

You could try using Ants Memory Profiler which is a very popular tool. It's fairly easy to use and it attempts to give you a graph illustrating what is holding on to your references. Underneath I believe it does something similar to that which Bond suggested, but it gives a much simpler user experience.

It comes with a free 14 day trial. An example of the instance graph is shown below:

Answer 2

you can try the sos extensions for windbg particularly the dumpheap and heapstat commands