Is it necessary to close a file after calling ReadAllText?

Question

I am doing the following:

if (File.Exists(filePath))
{
   string base64 = File.ReadAllText(filePath);
   return new ImageContentDTO
   {
      ImageContentGuid = imageContentGuid,
      Base64Data = base64
   };
}

This works perfectly fine. What I want to ask is if I need to Close the file or anything similar after I am done reading from it. And if so, how?

Answer 1

I know this question has been answered and this is almost a year now but for those who search and read this question, I would like to suggest you close a file when done with it, or at least do an investigation like my answer shows.

I am no programming expert but I have come across this situation recently.

I created a WinForms c# program and used File.ReadAllText to copy text to a string. Afterwards I tried to delete the file, directly from the folder not through the program, but I got an error that the file was still open in another program. I then stopped running the program and was able to delete the file.

That's my experience in Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate. It might be supposed to do something different, but that's what it did for me.

When I used StreamReader.ReadToEnd then StreamReader.Close on the same file, I had no problem deleting the file while running the program.