We Keep Coding

IDisposable for convenience? [duplicate]

I was having a discussion with a colleague recently about the value of Dispose and types that implement IDisposable.
I think there is value in implementing IDisposable for types that should clean up as soon as possible, even if there are no unmanaged resources to clean up.
My colleague thinks differently; implementing IDisposable if you don't have any unmanaged resources isn't necessary as your type will eventually be garbage collected.
My argument was that if you had an ADO.NET connection that you wanted to close as soon as possible, then implementing IDisposable and using new MyThingWithAConnection() would make sense. My colleage replied that, under the covers, an ADO.NET connection is an unmanaged resource. My reply to his reply was that everything ultimately is an unmanaged resource.
I am aware of the recommended disposable pattern where you free managed and unmanaged resources if Dispose is called but only free unmanaged resources if called via the finalizer/destructor (and blogged a while ago about how to alert consumers of improper use of your IDisposable types)
So, my question is, if you've got a type that doesn't contain unmanaged resources, is it worth implementing IDisposable?

There are different valid uses for IDisposable. A simple example is holding an open file, which you need to be closed at certain moment, as soon as you don't need it any more. Of course, you could provide a method Close, but having it in Dispose and using pattern like using (var f = new MyFile(path)) { /*process it*/ } would be more exception-safe.
A more popular example would be holding some other IDisposable resources, which usually means that you need to provide your own Dispose in order to dispose them as well.
In general, as soon as you want to have deterministic destruction of anything, you need to implement IDisposable.
The difference between my opinion and yours is that I implement IDisposable as soon as some resource needs deterministic destruction/freeing, not necessary as soon as possible. Relying on garbage collection is not an option in this case (contrary to your colleague's claim), because it happens at unpredictable moment of time, and actually may not happen at all!
The fact that any resource is unmanaged under the cover really doesn't mean anything: the developer should think in terms of "when and how is it right to dispose of this object" rather than "how does it work under the cover". The underlying implementation may change with the time anyway.
In fact, one of the main differences between C# and C++ is the absence of default deterministic destruction. The IDisposable comes to close the gap: you can order the deterministic destruction (although you cannot ensure the clients are calling it; the same way in C++ you cannot be sure that the clients call delete on the object).
Small addition: what is actually the difference between the deterministic freeing the resources and freeing them as soon as possible? Actually, those are different (though not completely orthogonal) notions.
If the resources are to be freed deterministically, this means that the client code should have a possibility to say "Now, I want this resource freed". This may be actually not the earliest possible moment when the resource may be freed: the object holding the resource might have got everything it needs from the resource, so potentially it could free the resource already. On the other hand, the object might choose to keep the (usually unmanaged) resource even after the object's Dispose ran through, cleaning it up only in finalizer (if holding the resource for too long time doesn't make any problem).
So, for freeing the resource as soon as possible, strictly speaking, Dispose is not necessary: the object may free the resource as soon as it realizes itself that the resource is not needed any more. Dispose however serves as a useful hint that the object itself is not needed any more, so perhaps the resources may be freed at that point if appropriate.
One more necessary addition: it's not only unmanaged resources that need deterministic deallocation! This seems to be one of key points of the difference in opinions among the answers to this question. One can have purely imaginative construct, which may need to be freed deterministically.
Examples are: a right to access some shared structure (think RW-lock), a huge memory chunk (imagine that you are managing some of the program's memory manually), a license for using some other program (imagine that you are not allowed to run more than X copies of some program simultaneously), etc. Here the object to be freed is not an unmanaged resource, but a right to do/to use something, which is a purely inner construct to your program logic.
Small addition: here is a small list of neat examples of [ab]using IDisposable: http://www.introtorx.com/Content/v1.0.10621.0/03_LifetimeManagement.html#IDisposable.

I think it's most helpful to think of IDisposable in terms of responsibilities. An object should implement IDisposable if it knows of something that will need to be done between the time it's no longer needed and the end of the universe (and preferably as soon as possible), and if it's the only object with both the information and impetus to do it. An object which opens a file, for example, would have a responsibility to see that the file gets closed. If the object were to simply disappear without closing the file, the file might not get closed in any reasonable timeframe.
It's important to note that even objects which only interact with 100% managed objects can do things that need to be cleaned up (and should use IDisposable). For example, an IEnumerator which attaches to a collection's "modified" event will need to detach itself when it is no longer needed. Otherwise, unless the enumerator uses some complex trickery, the enumerator will never be garbage-collected as long as the collection is in scope. If the collection is enumerated a million times, a million enumerators would get attached to its event handler.
Note that it's sometimes possible to use finalizers for cleanup in cases where, for whatever reason, an object gets abandoned without Dispose having been called first. Sometimes this works well; sometimes it works very badly. For example, even though Microsoft.VisualBasic.Collection uses a finalizer to detach enumerators from "modified" events, attempting to enumerate such an object thousands of times without an intervening Dispose or garbage-collection will cause it to get very slow--many orders of magnitude slower than the performance that would result if one used Dispose correctly.

So, my question is, if you've got a type that doesn't contain
unmanaged resources, is it worth implementing IDisposable?
When someone places an IDisposable interface on an object, this tells me that the creator intends on this either doing something in that method or, in the future they may intend to. I always call dispose in this instance just to be sure. Even if it doesn't do anything right now, it might in the future, and it sucks to get a memory leak because they updated an object, and you didn't call Dispose when you were writing code the first time.
In truth it's a judgement call. You don't want to over implement it, because at that point why bother having a garbage collector at all. Why not just manually dispose every object. If there is a possibility that you'll need to dispose unmanaged resources, then it might not be a bad idea. It all depends, if the only people using your object are the people on your team, you can always follow up with them later and say, "Hey this needs to use an unmanaged resource now. We have to go through the code and make sure we've tidied up." If you are publishing this for other organizations to use that's different. There is no easy way to tell everyone who might have implemented that object, "Hey you need to be sure this is now disposed." Let me tell you there are few things that make people madder than upgrading a third party assembly to find out that they are the ones who changed their code and made your application have run away memory problems.
My colleage replied that, under the covers, an ADO.NET connection is a
managed resource. My reply to his reply was that everything ultimately
is an unmanaged resource.
He's right, it's a managed resource right now. Will they ever change it? Who knows, but it doesn't hurt to call it. I don't try and make guesses as to what the ADO.NET team does, so if they put it in and it does nothing, that's fine. I'll still call it, because one line of code isn't going to affect my productivity.
You also run into another scenario. Let's say you return an ADO.NET connection from a method. You don't know that ADO connection is the base object or a derived type off the bat. You don't know if that IDisposable implementation has suddenly become necessary. I always call it no matter what, because tracking down memory leaks on a production server sucks when it's crashing every 4 hours.

While there are good answers to this already, I just wanted to make something explicit.
There are three cases for implementing IDisposable:
You are using unmanaged resources directly. This typically involves retrieving an IntPrt or some other form of handle from a P/Invoke call that has to be released by a different P/Invoke call
You are using other IDisposable objects and need to be responsible for their disposition
You have some other need of or use for it, including the convenience of the using block.
While I might be a bit biased, you should really read (and show your colleague) the StackOverflow Wiki on IDisposable.

Dispose should be used for any resource with a limited lifetime. A finalizer should be used for any unmanaged resource. Any unmanaged resource should have a limited lifetime, but there are plenty of managed resources (like locks) that also have limited lifetimes.

Note that unmanaged resources may well include standard CLR objects, for instance held in some static fields, all ran in safe mode with no unmanaged imports at all.
There is no simple way to tell if a given class implementing IDiposable actually needs to clean something. My rule of thumb is to always call Dispose on objects I don't know too well, like some 3rd party library.

No, it's not only for unmanaged resources.
It's suggested like a basic cleanup built-in mechanism called by framework, that enables you possibility to cleanup whatever resource you want, but it's best fit is naturally unmanaged resources management.

If you aggregate IDisposables then you should implement the interface in order that those members get cleaned up in a timely way. How else is myConn.Dispose() going to get called in the ADO.Net connection example you cite?
I don't think it's correct to say that everything is an unmanaged resource in this context though. Nor do I agree with your colleague.

You are right. Managed database connections, files, registry keys, sockets etc. all hold on to unmanaged objects. That is why they implement IDisposable. If your type owns disposable objects you should implement IDisposable and dispose them in your Dispose method. Otherwise they may stay alive until garbage collected resulting in locked files and other unexpected behavior.

everything ultimately is an unmanaged resource.
Not true. Everything except memory used by CLR objects which is managed (allocated and freed) only by the framework.
Implementing IDisposable and calling Dispose on an object that does not hold on to any unmanaged resources (directly or indirectly via dependent objects) is pointless. It does not make freeing that object deterministic because you can't directly free object's CLR memory on your own as it is always only GC that does that. Object being a reference type because value types, when used directly at a method level, are allocated/freed by stack operations.
Now, everyone claims to be right in their answers. Let me prove mine. According to documentation:
Object.Finalize Method allows an object to try to free resources and perform other cleanup operations before it is reclaimed by garbage collection.
In other words object's CLR memory is released just after Object.Finalize() is called. [note: it is possible to explicitly skip this call if needed]
Here is a disposable class with no unmanaged resources:
internal class Class1 : IDisposable
{
public Class1()
{
Console.WriteLine("Construct");
}
public void Dispose()
{
Console.WriteLine("Dispose");
}
~Class1()
{
Console.WriteLine("Destruct");
}
}
Note that destructor implicitly calls every Finalize in the inheritance chain down to Object.Finalize()
And here is the Main method of a console app:
static void Main(string[] args)
{
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
Class1 obj = new Class1();
obj.Dispose();
}
Console.ReadKey();
}
If calling Dispose was a way to free a managed object in a deterministic way, every "Dispose" would be immediately followed by a "Destruct", right? See for yourself what happens. It is most interesting to run this app from a command line window.
Note: There is a way to force GC to collect all objects which are pending finalization in the current app domain but no for a single specific object. Nevertheless you do not need to call Dispose to have an object in the finalization queue. It is strongly discouraged to force collection as it will likely hurt overall application performance.
EDIT
There is one exception - state management. Dispose can handle state change if your object happens to manage an outside state. Even if state is not an unmanaged object it is very convenient to use it like one because of special treatment IDisposable has. Example would be a security context or impersonation context.
using (WindowsImpersonationContext context = SomeUserIdentity.Impersonate()))
{
// do something as SomeUser
}
// back to your user
It is not the best example because WindowsImpersonationContext uses system handle internally but you get the picture.
Bottom line is that when implementing IDisposable you need to have (or plan to have) something meaningful to do in the Dispose method. Otherwise it's just a waste of time. IDisposable does not change how your object is managed by GC.

Your Type should implement IDisposable if it references unmanaged resources or if it holds references to objects that implement IDisposable.

In one of my projects I had a class with managed threads inside it, we'll call them thread A, and thread B, and an IDisposable object, we'll call it C.
A used to dispose of C on exiting.
B used to use C to save exceptions.
My class had to implement IDisposable and a descrtuctor to ensure things are disposed of in the correct order.
Yes the GC could clean up my items, but my experience was there was a race condition unless I managed the clean up of my class.

Short Answer: Absolutely NOT. If your type has members that are managed or unmanaged, you should implement IDisposable.
Now details:
I've answered this question and provided much more detail on the internals of memory management and the GC on questions here on StackOverflow. Here are just a few:
Is it bad practice to depend on the .NET automated garbage collector?
What happens if I don't call Dispose on the pen object?
Dispose, when is it called?
As far as best practices on the implementation of IDisposable, please refer to my blog post:
How do you properly implement the IDisposable pattern?

Implement IDisposable if the object owns any unmanaged objects or any managed disposable objects
If an object uses unmanaged resources, it should implement IDisposable. The object that owns a disposable object should implement IDisposable to ensure that the underlying unmanaged resources are released. If the rule/convention is followed, it is therefore logical to conclude that not disposing managed disposable objects equals not freeing unmanaged resources.

Not necessary resources at all (either managed or unmanaged). Often, IDisposable is just a convenient way to elimnate combersome try {..} finally {..}, just compare:
Cursor savedCursor = Cursor.Current;
try {
Cursor.Current = Cursors.WaitCursor;
SomeLongOperation();
}
finally {
Cursor.Current = savedCursor;
}
with
using (new WaitCursor()) {
SomeLongOperation();
}
where WaitCursor is IDisposable to be suitable for using:
public sealed class WaitCursor: IDisposable {
private Cursor m_Saved;
public Boolean Disposed {
get;
private set;
}
public WaitCursor() {
Cursor m_Saved = Cursor.Current;
Cursor.Current = Cursors.WaitCursor;
}
public void Dispose() {
if (!Disposed) {
Disposed = true;
Cursor.Current = m_Saved;
}
}
}
You can easily combine such classes:
using (new WaitCursor()) {
using (new RegisterServerLongOperation("My Long DB Operation")) {
SomeLongRdbmsOperation();
}
SomeLongOperation();
}

This use of GC.SuppressFinalize() doesn't feel right

I have been having some issues with utilizing a vendor library where occasionally an entity calculated by the library would be null when it should always have valid data in it.
The functioning code (after debugging the issue with the vendor) is roughly as follows:
Task.Factory.StartNew(() => ValidateCalibration(pelRectRaw2Ds, crspFeatures, Calibration.Raw2DFromPhys3Ds));
.....
private void ValidateCalibration(List<Rectangle> pelRectRaw2Ds, List<List<3DCrspFeaturesCollection>> crspFeatures, List<3DCameraCalibration> getRaw2DFromPhys3Ds)
{
var calibrationValidator = new 3DCameraCalibrationValidator();
// This is required according to vendor otherwise validationResultsUsingRecomputedExtrinsics is occasionally null after preforming the validation
GC.SuppressFinalize(calibrationValidator);
3DCameraCalibrationValidationResult validationResultUsingOriginalCalibrations;
3DCameraCalibrationValidationResult validationResultsUsingRecomputedExtrinsics;
calibrationValidator.Execute(pelRectRaw2Ds, crspFeatures, getRaw2DFromPhys3Ds, out validationResultUsingOriginalCalibrations, out validationResultsUsingRecomputedExtrinsics);
Calibration.CalibrationValidations.Add(new CalibrationValidation
{
Timestamp = DateTime.Now,
UserName = Globals.InspectionSystemObject.CurrentUserName,
ValidationResultUsingOriginalCalibrations = validationResultUsingOriginalCalibrations,
ValidationResultsUsingRecomputedExtrinsics = validationResultsUsingRecomputedExtrinsics
});
}
The validation process is a fairly time consuming operation so I hand it off to a Task. The problem I had was that originally I did not have the call to GC.SuppressFinalize(calibrationValidator) and when the application was run from a Release build, then the out parameter validationResultsUsingRecomputedExtrinsics would be null. If I ran the application from a Debug build (either with or without the Debugger attached) then validationResultsUsingRecomputedExtrinsics would contain valid data.
I don't fully understand what GC.SuppressFinalize() has done in this situation, or how it has fixed the problem. Everything I can find regarding GC.SuppressFinalize() is that it is used when implementing IDisposable. I can't find any use of it in "standard" code.
How/why does the addition of the call to GC.SuppressFinalize(calibrationValidator) fix this problem?
I understand that without intimate knowledge of the internals of the vendor library, it might not be possible to know for sure, but any insight would help.
The application is compiled with VS2012, targeting .NET 4.0. That vendor library requires that the useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy="true" option is specified in app.config.
This is the justification I received from the vendor:
The SuppressFinalize command makes sure that the garbage collector will not clean something up “early”. It seems like for some reason your application was sometimes having the garbage collector get a bit zealous and clean up the object before you were truly done with it; it is almost certainly scope related and possibly due to the multi-threading causing confusion on the scope of the calibrationValidator. Below is the response I got from Engineering.
Because the variable was created in the local scope, and that function runs in the background thread, Garbage Collection runs in the main thread, and it seems that the Garbage collection is not smart enough in handling multi-thread situations. Sometimes, it just releases it too early (internal execution of validator not finished yet, and still needs this variable).

This is in all likelihood a hack to solve a premature garbage collection problem. Not uncommon with unmanaged code, typical in camera applications. It is not a healthy hack, good odds that this will cause a resource leak because the finalizer doesn't execute. Wrappers for unmanaged code almost always have something to do in the finalizer, it is very common that they need to release unmanaged memory.
At issue is that the calibrationValidator object can be garbage collected while the unmanaged code is running. Having another thread in your program makes this likely since that other thread can be allocating objects and trigger a GC. This is very easy to miss by the owner of the code while testing, either by never having tested it while using multiple threads or just not getting lucky enough to trigger a GC at the wrong time.
The proper fix on your end is to ensure that the jitter marks the object in use past the call so that the garbage collector won't collect it. You do so by adding GC.KeepAlive(calibrationValidator) after the Execute() call.

When it comes to understanding IDisposable, GC.SuppressFinalize, and finalizers in C#, I don't think a better explanation exists than the following article.
DG Update: Dispose, Finalization, and Resource Management
Alright! Here it is: the revised “Dispose, Finalization, and Resource Management” Design Guideline entry. I mentioned this work previously here and here. At ~25 printed pages, it's not what I would consider to be a minor update. Took me much longer than anticipated, but I'm happy with the result. I got to work with and received good amounts of feedback from HSutter, BrianGru, CBrumme, Jeff Richter, and a couple other folks on it... Good fun.
Key Concept for this question:
It is so obvious that GC.SuppressFinalize() should only be called on this that the article doesn't even mention that directly. It does however mention the practice of wrapping finalizable objects to isolate them from a public API in order to ensure that external code is not able to call GC.SuppressFinalize() on those resources (see the following quote). Whoever designed the library described in the original question has no grasp on the way finalization in .NET works.
Quoted from the blog article:
Even in the absence of one of the rare situations noted above, a finalizable object with a publicly accessible reference could have its finalization suppressed by any arbitrary untrusted caller. Specifically, they can call GC.SuppressFinalize on you and prevent finalization from occurring altogether, including critical finalization. A good mitigation strategy to deal with this is to wrap critical resources in a non-public instance that has a finalizer. So long as you do not leak this to callers, they will not be able to suppress finalization. If you migrate to using SafeHandle in your class and never expose it outside your class, you can guarantee finalization of your resources (with the caveats mentioned above and assuming a correct SafeHandle implementation).

There are some mentions of multithreading or native code being the cause of this issue. But the same thing can happen in a purely managed and mostly single-threaded program.
Consider the following program:
using System;
class Program
{
private static void Main()
{
var outer = new Outer();
Console.WriteLine(outer.GetValue() == null);
}
}
class Outer
{
private Inner m_inner = new Inner();
public object GetValue()
{
return m_inner.GetValue();
}
~Outer()
{
m_inner.Dispose();
}
}
class Inner
{
private object m_value = new object();
public object GetValue()
{
GC.Collect();
GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers();
return m_value;
}
public void Dispose()
{
m_value = null;
}
}
Here, while outer.GetValue() is being called, outer will be garbage collected and finalized (at least in Release mode). The finalizer nulls out the field of the Inner object, which means GetValue() will return null.
In real code, you most likely wouldn't have the GC calls there. Instead you would create some managed object, which (non-deterministically) causes the garbage collector to run.
(I said this code is mostly single-threaded. In fact, the finalizer will run on another thread, but because of the call to WaitForPendingFinalizers(), it's almost as if it ran on the main thread.)

Why doesn't CLR handle the cleanup code?

I have just started with the .NET framework. Today, I was taught about the IDisposable interface and the dispose() method. I was taught a few things regarding it:
dispose() should contain the cleanup code corresponding to an object(like closing any resources occupied by any objects - files or database connections,etc.)
I was also told that in case we don't do it in the dispose() method, the same could be done in the destructor, but that doesn't ensure immediate execution, and we are left to the mercy of GC.
And if at all we don't provide any cleanup code at all, the GC will forcefully terminate all connections to resources that our objects were holding. Hence, we should handle the cleanup code ourselves.
But I was curious as to why doesn't CLR handle this on it's own? It takes care of Memory Management, it takes care of Garbage Collection. So, it should very well know which Object holds onto which resource(s) and when that Object dies off. So, it should be capable of de-allocating those resources as well?
I asked a few people about it. The answer I was given was that it is because we need to close it gracefully, where as GC closes it forcefully. Is it actually the reason?

In .NET there's much more than managed code that the GC knows about. There's like a huge volume of unmanaged code involved: all the file handles, database connections, network sockets, ... all this is plain ol' unmanaged Win32 code. You can't even believe that in almost every single BCL function you are calling from your pretty C# application, you will be hitting like tons of unmanaged functions written in C++ (and may God forbid VB6) and buried deep into the internals of the OS itself. All those functions are allocating unmanaged memory, handles, ... The managed world doesn't know what happens there.
For example every single time you open a file (FileStream) you are basically calling (behind the scenes of course) the CreateFile unmanaged Win32 function. This function allocates an unmanaged file handle directly from the file system. .NET and the GC has strictly no way of tracking this unmanaged code and everything it does. That's why those classes implement the IDisposable interface. So that you could always wrap their instances in using statements and ensure that the Dispose method is always called, even in the event of an exception, and this as soon as possible. The Dispose method will take care of calling another unmanaged function to clean the mess it created.
So basically the way you could think about the IDisposable interface is the following:
The day when we have an operating system written in a fully managed language (something like Midori for example from Microsoft Research) we will probably no longer need IDisposable as the GC will be able to completely replace it as it will have knowledge of everything that happens within this system.

The point of IDisposable and Dispose() is that you should clean up unmanaged memory. That's memory .NET didn't allocate, which came from outside sources and thus the GC cannot know about it. So it cannot clean it up for you automatically. Essentially that's precisely the difference between managed and unmanaged memory ;-)
Generally you should implement Dispose() to clean up whatever unmanaged resources your class uses and implement the finalizer to call Dispose() too. The finalizer is just a safeguard, though. It will make sure that those resources get cleaned up eventually, if the caller forgets to dispose of your class properly.

The IDisposable interface is there to provide you a way to clean up un-managed resources. The CLR only manages your managed resources for you.
In other words, the CLR only knows how to clean up the things that it manages. If you open connections to the rest of the system (like opening files, database connections, etc.), those are your responsibility and you need to tell the CLR how you want it to clean those up for you.

It can only take care of memory management for .NET objects. Any code that needs to use unmanaged resources (because it interacts with a C++ library, for example) falls outside the garbage collector's bailiwick. All that code needs to be told when to release its resources the old-fashioned way.

There's no way for the .Net framework (and the GC) to know how to release a un-managed resource. All it can do, is destroy the reference your managed code has to the resource. It is a lot better to actually call .Close() on a connection to your database server (thereby telling it that the connection should go back into the poll of available connection), than just destroying the reference, and letting it timeout on it's own after a set amount of seconds.
So whenever possible, use the IDisposable interface when referencing un-managed resources!

IDisposable is used when you don't want the GC to handle that particular artifact. The most common example are connections, or file handles. You don't want to wait for the GC to run before releasing a file, or to close a connection to the database, since you don't know when that will happen.
Most people associate IDisposable with unmanaged resources, which is mostly accurate, but fail to remember that finalizers are the proper .NET way to handle those. IDisposable provides a way of deterministicly disposing if that is important to your program.

The IDisposable interface is simply a convention to allow you to deterministically dispose of managed and unmanaged resources. It alone doesn't replace garbage collection or do anything involving the garbage collector itself.
It is more apparent with unmanaged resources because unless these are handled (either in a finalizer or with deterministic disposal) they will remain as a memory leak until the process ends. With managed memory, if you don't deterministically dispose of the items they will be undeterministically collected (assuming eventual eligibility for collection) by the GC, because they are managed (this is also the reason why the dispose pattern doesn't include managed items in the finalizer route).
IDisposable itself doesn't do anything, it is just a recognised interface (and is supported in code with the using keyword) that people expect to find when handling items that use consumable resources, unmanaged memory, external items, etc.
The CLR cannot possibly know when an external item is finished with. That is entirely dependent on the flow of your application. If you happen to also not know when to dispose an object, the finalizer syntax is useful. If you implement a finalizer on a custom class, the garbage collection process will run this finalizer just prior to final collection. This is your last chance to tidy up after yourself.

we use Dispose in order to dispose unmanaged resssource as file access or connection database, because GC don't have information about this unmanaged ressource.
you can also use Finalize, but it's not performant because you save your ressource in finalisation structure, and GC pass in the end of dispose cycle by this finalisation structure, and it's not performant

Should "Dispose" only be used for types containing unmanaged resources?

I was having a discussion with a colleague recently about the value of Dispose and types that implement IDisposable.
I think there is value in implementing IDisposable for types that should clean up as soon as possible, even if there are no unmanaged resources to clean up.
My colleague thinks differently; implementing IDisposable if you don't have any unmanaged resources isn't necessary as your type will eventually be garbage collected.
My argument was that if you had an ADO.NET connection that you wanted to close as soon as possible, then implementing IDisposable and using new MyThingWithAConnection() would make sense. My colleage replied that, under the covers, an ADO.NET connection is an unmanaged resource. My reply to his reply was that everything ultimately is an unmanaged resource.
I am aware of the recommended disposable pattern where you free managed and unmanaged resources if Dispose is called but only free unmanaged resources if called via the finalizer/destructor (and blogged a while ago about how to alert consumers of improper use of your IDisposable types)
So, my question is, if you've got a type that doesn't contain unmanaged resources, is it worth implementing IDisposable?

There are different valid uses for IDisposable. A simple example is holding an open file, which you need to be closed at certain moment, as soon as you don't need it any more. Of course, you could provide a method Close, but having it in Dispose and using pattern like using (var f = new MyFile(path)) { /*process it*/ } would be more exception-safe.
A more popular example would be holding some other IDisposable resources, which usually means that you need to provide your own Dispose in order to dispose them as well.
In general, as soon as you want to have deterministic destruction of anything, you need to implement IDisposable.
The difference between my opinion and yours is that I implement IDisposable as soon as some resource needs deterministic destruction/freeing, not necessary as soon as possible. Relying on garbage collection is not an option in this case (contrary to your colleague's claim), because it happens at unpredictable moment of time, and actually may not happen at all!
The fact that any resource is unmanaged under the cover really doesn't mean anything: the developer should think in terms of "when and how is it right to dispose of this object" rather than "how does it work under the cover". The underlying implementation may change with the time anyway.
In fact, one of the main differences between C# and C++ is the absence of default deterministic destruction. The IDisposable comes to close the gap: you can order the deterministic destruction (although you cannot ensure the clients are calling it; the same way in C++ you cannot be sure that the clients call delete on the object).
Small addition: what is actually the difference between the deterministic freeing the resources and freeing them as soon as possible? Actually, those are different (though not completely orthogonal) notions.
If the resources are to be freed deterministically, this means that the client code should have a possibility to say "Now, I want this resource freed". This may be actually not the earliest possible moment when the resource may be freed: the object holding the resource might have got everything it needs from the resource, so potentially it could free the resource already. On the other hand, the object might choose to keep the (usually unmanaged) resource even after the object's Dispose ran through, cleaning it up only in finalizer (if holding the resource for too long time doesn't make any problem).
So, for freeing the resource as soon as possible, strictly speaking, Dispose is not necessary: the object may free the resource as soon as it realizes itself that the resource is not needed any more. Dispose however serves as a useful hint that the object itself is not needed any more, so perhaps the resources may be freed at that point if appropriate.
One more necessary addition: it's not only unmanaged resources that need deterministic deallocation! This seems to be one of key points of the difference in opinions among the answers to this question. One can have purely imaginative construct, which may need to be freed deterministically.
Examples are: a right to access some shared structure (think RW-lock), a huge memory chunk (imagine that you are managing some of the program's memory manually), a license for using some other program (imagine that you are not allowed to run more than X copies of some program simultaneously), etc. Here the object to be freed is not an unmanaged resource, but a right to do/to use something, which is a purely inner construct to your program logic.
Small addition: here is a small list of neat examples of [ab]using IDisposable: http://www.introtorx.com/Content/v1.0.10621.0/03_LifetimeManagement.html#IDisposable.

I think it's most helpful to think of IDisposable in terms of responsibilities. An object should implement IDisposable if it knows of something that will need to be done between the time it's no longer needed and the end of the universe (and preferably as soon as possible), and if it's the only object with both the information and impetus to do it. An object which opens a file, for example, would have a responsibility to see that the file gets closed. If the object were to simply disappear without closing the file, the file might not get closed in any reasonable timeframe.
It's important to note that even objects which only interact with 100% managed objects can do things that need to be cleaned up (and should use IDisposable). For example, an IEnumerator which attaches to a collection's "modified" event will need to detach itself when it is no longer needed. Otherwise, unless the enumerator uses some complex trickery, the enumerator will never be garbage-collected as long as the collection is in scope. If the collection is enumerated a million times, a million enumerators would get attached to its event handler.
Note that it's sometimes possible to use finalizers for cleanup in cases where, for whatever reason, an object gets abandoned without Dispose having been called first. Sometimes this works well; sometimes it works very badly. For example, even though Microsoft.VisualBasic.Collection uses a finalizer to detach enumerators from "modified" events, attempting to enumerate such an object thousands of times without an intervening Dispose or garbage-collection will cause it to get very slow--many orders of magnitude slower than the performance that would result if one used Dispose correctly.

So, my question is, if you've got a type that doesn't contain
unmanaged resources, is it worth implementing IDisposable?
When someone places an IDisposable interface on an object, this tells me that the creator intends on this either doing something in that method or, in the future they may intend to. I always call dispose in this instance just to be sure. Even if it doesn't do anything right now, it might in the future, and it sucks to get a memory leak because they updated an object, and you didn't call Dispose when you were writing code the first time.
In truth it's a judgement call. You don't want to over implement it, because at that point why bother having a garbage collector at all. Why not just manually dispose every object. If there is a possibility that you'll need to dispose unmanaged resources, then it might not be a bad idea. It all depends, if the only people using your object are the people on your team, you can always follow up with them later and say, "Hey this needs to use an unmanaged resource now. We have to go through the code and make sure we've tidied up." If you are publishing this for other organizations to use that's different. There is no easy way to tell everyone who might have implemented that object, "Hey you need to be sure this is now disposed." Let me tell you there are few things that make people madder than upgrading a third party assembly to find out that they are the ones who changed their code and made your application have run away memory problems.
My colleage replied that, under the covers, an ADO.NET connection is a
managed resource. My reply to his reply was that everything ultimately
is an unmanaged resource.
He's right, it's a managed resource right now. Will they ever change it? Who knows, but it doesn't hurt to call it. I don't try and make guesses as to what the ADO.NET team does, so if they put it in and it does nothing, that's fine. I'll still call it, because one line of code isn't going to affect my productivity.
You also run into another scenario. Let's say you return an ADO.NET connection from a method. You don't know that ADO connection is the base object or a derived type off the bat. You don't know if that IDisposable implementation has suddenly become necessary. I always call it no matter what, because tracking down memory leaks on a production server sucks when it's crashing every 4 hours.

While there are good answers to this already, I just wanted to make something explicit.
There are three cases for implementing IDisposable:
You are using unmanaged resources directly. This typically involves retrieving an IntPrt or some other form of handle from a P/Invoke call that has to be released by a different P/Invoke call
You are using other IDisposable objects and need to be responsible for their disposition
You have some other need of or use for it, including the convenience of the using block.
While I might be a bit biased, you should really read (and show your colleague) the StackOverflow Wiki on IDisposable.

Dispose should be used for any resource with a limited lifetime. A finalizer should be used for any unmanaged resource. Any unmanaged resource should have a limited lifetime, but there are plenty of managed resources (like locks) that also have limited lifetimes.

Note that unmanaged resources may well include standard CLR objects, for instance held in some static fields, all ran in safe mode with no unmanaged imports at all.
There is no simple way to tell if a given class implementing IDiposable actually needs to clean something. My rule of thumb is to always call Dispose on objects I don't know too well, like some 3rd party library.

No, it's not only for unmanaged resources.
It's suggested like a basic cleanup built-in mechanism called by framework, that enables you possibility to cleanup whatever resource you want, but it's best fit is naturally unmanaged resources management.

If you aggregate IDisposables then you should implement the interface in order that those members get cleaned up in a timely way. How else is myConn.Dispose() going to get called in the ADO.Net connection example you cite?
I don't think it's correct to say that everything is an unmanaged resource in this context though. Nor do I agree with your colleague.

You are right. Managed database connections, files, registry keys, sockets etc. all hold on to unmanaged objects. That is why they implement IDisposable. If your type owns disposable objects you should implement IDisposable and dispose them in your Dispose method. Otherwise they may stay alive until garbage collected resulting in locked files and other unexpected behavior.

everything ultimately is an unmanaged resource.
Not true. Everything except memory used by CLR objects which is managed (allocated and freed) only by the framework.
Implementing IDisposable and calling Dispose on an object that does not hold on to any unmanaged resources (directly or indirectly via dependent objects) is pointless. It does not make freeing that object deterministic because you can't directly free object's CLR memory on your own as it is always only GC that does that. Object being a reference type because value types, when used directly at a method level, are allocated/freed by stack operations.
Now, everyone claims to be right in their answers. Let me prove mine. According to documentation:
Object.Finalize Method allows an object to try to free resources and perform other cleanup operations before it is reclaimed by garbage collection.
In other words object's CLR memory is released just after Object.Finalize() is called. [note: it is possible to explicitly skip this call if needed]
Here is a disposable class with no unmanaged resources:
internal class Class1 : IDisposable
{
public Class1()
{
Console.WriteLine("Construct");
}
public void Dispose()
{
Console.WriteLine("Dispose");
}
~Class1()
{
Console.WriteLine("Destruct");
}
}
Note that destructor implicitly calls every Finalize in the inheritance chain down to Object.Finalize()
And here is the Main method of a console app:
static void Main(string[] args)
{
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
Class1 obj = new Class1();
obj.Dispose();
}
Console.ReadKey();
}
If calling Dispose was a way to free a managed object in a deterministic way, every "Dispose" would be immediately followed by a "Destruct", right? See for yourself what happens. It is most interesting to run this app from a command line window.
Note: There is a way to force GC to collect all objects which are pending finalization in the current app domain but no for a single specific object. Nevertheless you do not need to call Dispose to have an object in the finalization queue. It is strongly discouraged to force collection as it will likely hurt overall application performance.
EDIT
There is one exception - state management. Dispose can handle state change if your object happens to manage an outside state. Even if state is not an unmanaged object it is very convenient to use it like one because of special treatment IDisposable has. Example would be a security context or impersonation context.
using (WindowsImpersonationContext context = SomeUserIdentity.Impersonate()))
{
// do something as SomeUser
}
// back to your user
It is not the best example because WindowsImpersonationContext uses system handle internally but you get the picture.
Bottom line is that when implementing IDisposable you need to have (or plan to have) something meaningful to do in the Dispose method. Otherwise it's just a waste of time. IDisposable does not change how your object is managed by GC.

Your Type should implement IDisposable if it references unmanaged resources or if it holds references to objects that implement IDisposable.

In one of my projects I had a class with managed threads inside it, we'll call them thread A, and thread B, and an IDisposable object, we'll call it C.
A used to dispose of C on exiting.
B used to use C to save exceptions.
My class had to implement IDisposable and a descrtuctor to ensure things are disposed of in the correct order.
Yes the GC could clean up my items, but my experience was there was a race condition unless I managed the clean up of my class.

Short Answer: Absolutely NOT. If your type has members that are managed or unmanaged, you should implement IDisposable.
Now details:
I've answered this question and provided much more detail on the internals of memory management and the GC on questions here on StackOverflow. Here are just a few:
Is it bad practice to depend on the .NET automated garbage collector?
What happens if I don't call Dispose on the pen object?
Dispose, when is it called?
As far as best practices on the implementation of IDisposable, please refer to my blog post:
How do you properly implement the IDisposable pattern?

Implement IDisposable if the object owns any unmanaged objects or any managed disposable objects
If an object uses unmanaged resources, it should implement IDisposable. The object that owns a disposable object should implement IDisposable to ensure that the underlying unmanaged resources are released. If the rule/convention is followed, it is therefore logical to conclude that not disposing managed disposable objects equals not freeing unmanaged resources.

Not necessary resources at all (either managed or unmanaged). Often, IDisposable is just a convenient way to elimnate combersome try {..} finally {..}, just compare:
Cursor savedCursor = Cursor.Current;
try {
Cursor.Current = Cursors.WaitCursor;
SomeLongOperation();
}
finally {
Cursor.Current = savedCursor;
}
with
using (new WaitCursor()) {
SomeLongOperation();
}
where WaitCursor is IDisposable to be suitable for using:
public sealed class WaitCursor: IDisposable {
private Cursor m_Saved;
public Boolean Disposed {
get;
private set;
}
public WaitCursor() {
Cursor m_Saved = Cursor.Current;
Cursor.Current = Cursors.WaitCursor;
}
public void Dispose() {
if (!Disposed) {
Disposed = true;
Cursor.Current = m_Saved;
}
}
}
You can easily combine such classes:
using (new WaitCursor()) {
using (new RegisterServerLongOperation("My Long DB Operation")) {
SomeLongRdbmsOperation();
}
SomeLongOperation();
}

The primary use of IDisposable interface [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Closed 11 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
Proper use of the IDisposable interface
"IDisposable Interface" article tells:
The primary use of this interface is to release unmanaged resources
Why? Why only unmanaged?
Whole my life I thought its PRIMIRALY use is to release ANY resources: managed (connections to DBs, services proxies, etc) and unmanaged (if they are used in application).
P.S.
I believe there are already questions on this topic, but can't find them.

The underlying connections to db's are not managed, as are file handles and a number of other low-level o/s objects. They are unmanaged. Implementing an IDisposable interface implies that you are not just relying on the garbage collector to release those resources; but you are closing those resources using what ever low-level API that you have available.
Also, I think Eric Lippert's answer (2nd one down) to a similar question is a very good explanation on why you would use IDisposable.

If you read further there is an explanation:
The garbage collector automatically
releases the memory allocated to a
managed object when that object is no
longer used. However, it is not
possible to predict when garbage
collection will occur. Furthermore,
the garbage collector has no knowledge
of unmanaged resources such as window
handles, or open files and streams.
Garbage collector takes care about managed resources. This is why they are managed.
Also, connection resource in your example is not managed resource. .NET connection classes wrap unmanaged resources.

IDisposable.Dispose() is responsible for two things:
Releasing unmanaged resources that the object might own
Dispose()ing other IDisposables owned by the object

Your answer to
Why? Why only unmanaged?
Lifetime of the managed resources are controlled by garbage collector. Which is one of the nice reason that you use C# or Java.

Instead of "unmanaged resources", think "responsibilities". When an object is described as holding "unamanged resources", what that really means is that:
The class has the information and impetus necessary to do something to an outside entity.
If that action never gets done, something else won't work as well as it otherwise would (the effects may be minor or severe).
If the class is doesn't perform the action, nothing else will.
The most common situation where a class will have cleanup responsibilities is when some other entity has been asked to reserve something (be it a file, GDI handle, lock, array slot, memory block, communications channel, or whatever) until further notice. If nothing tells that other entity that the thing it's reserved is no longer needed, it will never allow anything else to use it.
If an object which has an important responsibility to perform some action gets swept away by the garbage collector before fulfilling its responsibility, the action will never get performed. There are two ways this can be prevented:
If an object implements IDisposable, "someone" (either another object or a running procedure) should be slated to call Dispose method before it's abandoned. Dispose shouldn't be thought of as destroying an object, but rather telling an object to carry out its final responsibilities so it may be safely abandoned.
Objects can ask the system to let them know when they've been abandoned, before they're swept away. While such notifications can reduce the danger that a required action might never be performed, it is dangerous to rely upon them since they will often not come in a particularly timely fashion, and in some cases may never come at all.
Objects which provide for the second cleanup approach are called "managed resources".