It’s very unintuitive, but the runtime can decide that an object is garbagemuch sooner than you expect. More specifically, an object can become
garbage while a method is executing on the object, which is contrary to most
developers’ expectations. Chris Brumme explains the issue on his blog. I’ve
taken Chris’s code and expanded it into a full app that you can play with if
you want to prove to yourself that this is a real problem:
using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
class Win32
{
[DllImport(“kernel32.dll”)]
public static extern IntPtr CreateEvent( IntPtr lpEventAttributes,
bool bManualReset,bool bInitialState, string lpName);
[DllImport(“kernel32.dll”, SetLastError=true)]
public static extern bool CloseHandle(IntPtr hObject);
[DllImport(“kernel32.dll”)]
public static extern bool SetEvent(IntPtr hEvent);
}
class EventUser
{
public EventUser()
{
hEvent = Win32.CreateEvent( IntPtr.Zero, false, false, null );
}
~EventUser()
{
Win32.CloseHandle( hEvent );
Console.WriteLine(“EventUser finalized”);
}
public void UseEvent()
{
UseEventInStatic( this.hEvent );
}
static void UseEventInStatic( IntPtr hEvent )
Satish Marwat Dot Net Web Resources satishcm@gmail.com 12 Page
{
//GC.Collect();
bool bSuccess = Win32.SetEvent( hEvent );
Console.WriteLine( “SetEvent ” + (bSuccess ? “succeeded” : “FAILED!”) );
}
IntPtr hEvent;
}
class App
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
EventUser eventUser = new EventUser();
eventUser.UseEvent();
}
}
If you run this code, it’ll probably work fine, and you’ll get the following
output:
SetEvent succeeded
EventDemo finalized
However, if you uncomment the GC.Collect() call in the UseEventInStatic()
method, you’ll get this output:
EventDemo finalized
SetEvent FAILED!
(Note that you need to use a release build to reproduce this problem.)
So what’s happening here? Well, at the point where UseEvent() calls
UseEventInStatic(), a copy is taken of the hEvent field, and there are no
further references to the EventUser object anywhere in the code. So as far as
the runtime is concerned, the EventUser object is garbage and can be
collected. Normally of course the collection won’t happen immediately, so
you’ll get away with it, but sooner or later a collection will occur at the wrong
time, and your app will fail.
A solution to this problem is to add a call to GC.KeepAlive(this) to the end of
the UseEvent method, as Chris explains.