Resources that have to be manually cleaned up in C#?

Question

What resources have to be manually cleaned up in C# and what are the consequences of not doing so?

For example, say I have the following code:

myBrush = new System.Drawing.SolidBrush(System.Drawing.Color.Black);
// Use Brush

If I don't clean up the brush using the dispose method, I'm assuming the garbage collector frees the memory used at program termination? Is this correct?

What other resources do I need to manually clean up?

Answer 1

If you don't dispose something, it'll be cleaned up when the garbage collector notices that there are no more references to it in your code, which may be after some time. For something like that, it doesn't really matter, but for an open file it probably does.

In general, if something has a Dispose method, you should call it when you've finished with it, or, if you can, wrap it up in a using statement:

using (SolidBrush myBrush = new System.Drawing.SolidBrush(System.Drawing.Color.Black))
{
    // use myBrush
}