Unlocking the Secrets of Managed memory: Dive into event handler leak insights!

[Kent Sharkey]

Visual Studio[^]:

Event handler leaks have been around for a long time, and they are one of the peskiest issues WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) developers regularly deal with.

But .NET *never* leaks memory, right?

[trønderen]

The problem is that the memory isn't "leaked" if someone, or anyone, has a reference to it. The publisher / event has. If .net decided to garbage collect the subscriber, the event would be left with a (non-null) invalid pointer. As soon as the event (or rather: the last event) referencing the subscriber, dotNet would garbage collect it. I really would feel uncomfortable with dotNet garbage collecting an object still referenced.

[obermd]

I was going to post this. The real issue here isn't a memory management leak, it's a failure to reclaim a counted reference item, which you don't want to do as long as there's a reference to it.