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Source Code

The SimpleGC project is included under the Chapter 8 subdirectory.

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Building Finalizable Objects

In Chapter 6, you learned that the supreme base class of .NET, System.Object, defines a virtual

method named Finalize(). The default implementation of this method does nothing whatsoever:

// System.Object

public class Object

{

...

protected virtual void Finalize() {}

}

When you override Finalize() for your custom classes, you establish a specific location to per-

form any necessary cleanup logic for your type. Given that this member is defined as protected, it is

not possible to directly call an object’s Finalize() method from a class instance via the dot opera-

tor. Rather, the garbage collector will call an object’s Finalize() method (if supported) before

removing the object from memory.