Should I always disconnect event handlers in the D

Question

I'm working in C# and my workplace has some code standards. One of them is that each event handler we connect (such as KeyDown) must be disconnected in the Dispose method. Is there any good reason for that?

Answer 1

Unless you expect the publisher of the event to outlive the subscriber, there's no reason to remove the event handler, no.

This is one of those topics where folk lore has grown up. You really just need to think about it in normal terms: the publisher (e.g. the button) has a reference to the subscriber. If both the publisher and the subscriber will be eligible for garbage collection at the same time anyway (as is common) or if the publisher will be eligible for garbage collection earlier, then there's no GC issue.

Static events cause a GC problem because they're effectively an infinitely-long-lived publisher - I would discourage static events entirely, where possible. (I very rarely find them useful.)

The other possible issue is if you explicitly want to stop listening for events because your object will misbehave if the event is raised (e.g. it will try to write to a closed stream). In that case, yes, you should remove the handler. That's most likely to be in the case where your class implements IDisposable already. It would be unusual - though not impossible - for it to be worth implementing IDisposable just to remove event handlers.

Answer 2

I had a major GDI leak in my application if I didn't unregister the event handlers in the Dispose() of a user control that was being dynamically created and destroyed. I found the following in the Visual Studio 2013 help, in the C# Programming Guide. Note the stuff I have put in italics:

How to: Subscribe to and Unsubscribe from Events

...snip...

Unsubscribing

To prevent your event handler from being invoked when the event is raised, unsubscribe from the event. In order to prevent resource leaks, you should unsubscribe from events before you dispose of a subscriber object. Until you unsubscribe from an event, the multicast delegate that underlies the event in the publishing object has a reference to the delegate that encapsulates the subscriber's event handler. As long as the publishing object holds that reference, garbage collection will not delete your subscriber object.

Note that in my case both the publisher and the subscriber were in the same class, and the handlers are not static.