Alan Kleymeyer

I ran into my first bad encounter with C# garbage collection.  The destructor I added to my main application form wasn’t being called.  I tried forcing it with GC.Collect(), nothing.

What worked was adding IDisposable as a base class and implementing Dispose(), then adding a using{} block around my main form:

using (myMainForm = new MyMainForm()
{
.
Application.Run(myMainForm);
.
}

This seems to defeat the purpose of destructors, or at least the convenience of relying on them to do cleanup.

I don’t like the Dispose/using technique so I actually replaced it with a handler for the Form.Closing event.  Of course this only works with Form derived classes.

There may be something special about the main form preventing the destructor from being called.  I know the main form is being destroyed because it contains an object whose destructor DOES get called.

A few helpful web pages I googled in researching this anomoly:
http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=6905
http://www.ondotnet.com/pub/a/dotnet/2002/02/11/csharp_traps.html?page=1
http://www.andymcm.com/csharpfaq.htm

To think I scoured the net for RegEx examples of parsing RFC822 & ISO 8601 when the DateTime class supported it all along:

Parsing Dates and Times in .NET (Thanks Steve)

Mark explains what the dc:date in an RSS feed is all about

dc:date conforms to ISO8601

XSLT Primer

Getting Strated With XSLT

HTMl Escapes

XSLT Processing in .NET

The 30 minute RegEx tutorial
Regular-Expressions.info

Visual Expression Builder

Bill Wagner’s Effective C# Book on the Addison-Wesley website. Reviewed here.

Richter’s Applied.NET Programming book

From an Amazon review of Tom’s book:

I purchased this book after reading Mr. Archer’s Visual C++.NET Bible and am extremely happy with it. I have quite a few C# books and can say without hesitation that this book, Jesse Liberty’s and Petzold’s SECOND C# book are the only C# books worth owning. You buy those three and you’ll be set. I personally use them as follows:

* Jesse Liberty – Better than Archer in terms of tutorial style writing. Use this book as your first C# book
* Tom Archer – Awesome reference material and low-level details of the language. Use this book as a reference after finishing Liberty’s book
* Charles Petzold – Great for learning how to write Windows apps with C# – once you’ve learned the language with Archer & Liberty.