CriticalHandle.ReleaseHandle Method

protected:
 abstract bool ReleaseHandle();

protected abstract bool ReleaseHandle ();

abstract member ReleaseHandle : unit -> bool

Protected MustOverride Function ReleaseHandle () As Boolean

Returns

true if the handle is released successfully; otherwise, in the event of a catastrophic failure, false. In this case, it generates a releaseHandleFailed Managed Debugging Assistant.

Remarks

The ReleaseHandle method is guaranteed to be called only once, provided that you employ proper synchronization mechanisms to ensure that only one call to the Close or Dispose method is made. The ReleaseHandle method will not be called if the IsInvalid or IsClosed property is true. Implement this method in your CriticalHandle derived classes to execute any code that is required to free the handle. Because one of the functions of CriticalHandle is to guarantee prevention of resource leaks, the code in your implementation of ReleaseHandle must never fail. The garbage collector calls ReleaseHandle after normal finalizers have been run for objects that were garbage collected at the same time, and guarantees the resources to invoke it and that it will not be interrupted while it is in progress. This method will be prepared as a constrained execution region (CER) at instance construction time (along with all the methods in its statically determinable call graph). Although this prevents thread abort interrupts, you must still be careful not to introduce any fault paths in your overridden ReleaseHandle method. In particular, apply the ReliabilityContractAttribute attribute to any methods you call from ReleaseHandle. In most cases this code should be:

ReliabilityContract(Consistency.WillNotCorruptState, Cer.Success)

Additionally, for simple cleanup (for example, calling the Windows API CloseHandle on a file handle) you can check the return value for the single platform invoke call. For complex cleanup, you may have a lot of program logic and many method calls, some of which might fail. You must ensure that your program logic has fallback code for each of those cases.

If the ReleaseHandle method returns false for any reason, it generates a releaseHandleFailed Managed Debugging Assistant.

Applies to

See also

• Diagnosing Run-time Errors with Managed Debugging Assistants
• ReleaseHandleFailed