Should I be calling Dispose on Reactive Extensions (Rx) Subject<T>

Question

I am using the Reactive Extensions (Rx) Subject as a direct replacement for C# events like so:

public class MyClass
{
    private Subject<string> subject;

    public IObservable<string> WhenSomethingHappened
    {
        get { return this.subject.AsObservable(); }
    }

    private void OnSomethingHappened(string something)
    {
        this.subject.OnNext(something);
    }
}

Note that I never call OnCompleted on my subject. Should MyClass be implementing IDisposable and calling this.subject.Dispose? This would mean that any implementation using Subject should implement IDisposable.

The reason I ask is that the IDisposable pattern is a bit like a disease, if one thing implements it, everything that uses it has to implement it too.

Answer 1

Nope, you don't really need to do this. When worrying about memory usage and lifetimes, think about disposing Subscriptions, not Subjects.