#431 – The using Statement Automates Invocation of the Dispose Method

A class may implement the IDisposable interface, providing a Dispose method, to allow for deterministic destruction.  Client code calls Dispose when it is done using the object, telling it to release resources that it might be holding.

It can be hard to ensure that you always call Dispose when appropriate, especially when exceptions occur.

The using statement in C# specifies the scope in which you want to use an object and guarantees that the Dispose method will be called when the object goes out of scope.

            using (StreamWriter writer =
                new StreamWriter(@"D:\Remember.txt"))
            {
                writer.Write("RIP Steve Jobs, 1955-2011");
            }

If we look at the IL generated for the using statement, we can see that it is converted to a try/finally block and the Dispose method of the StreamWriter object is called in the finally block.