How do you dispose of an IDisposable in Managed C++?

Question

I'm trying to Dispose of an IDisposable object(FileStream^ fs) in managed C++ (.NET 2.0) and am getting the error

Dispose' : is not a member of 'System::IO::FileStream

It says that I should invoke the destructor instead. Will calling

fs->~FileStream(); 

call the dispose method on the FileStream object? Why can't I call Dispose?

Answer 1

The correct pattern is to just delete the object:

delete fs; 

This will be translated into a call to Dispose().

See this post for some of the details of what is going on under the hood. The advantage of this idiom is that it allows you to write:

{   FileStream fs(...)   ... } 

And have the Dispose method called correctly ... equivalent to a using block in C#. The file stream object is still allocated on the managed heap.