Upgrade VB6 Container Class to VB.NET

Question

Okay, so I'm upgrading a VB6 app to VB.NET and I'm unsure of how to modernize the class_terminate component of a container class I'm building:

Private Sub class_terminate()
    If Not (colUserMappings Is Nothing) Then
        Set colUserMappings = Nothing
    End If
End Sub

The issue is that the .NET equivalent of this .Finalize leaves open some potential runtime errors, because setting a container's final reference to nothing doesn't necessarily destroy the container, as .NET languages have non-deterministic finalization.

That being the case, how would I modernize the collections class in such a way that calling its terminate or finalize function would actually result in the destruction of the container at the end? Is there a good workaround for this?

You shouldn't have to do this. The Garbage Collector will do the work for you. — vcsjones, Jun 11 '13 at 17:18
Why do you need to destruct the container class before all references to it have been dropped? — RBarryYoung, Jun 11 '13 at 17:20
So I can just discard the class_terminate() sub entirely for the new version? — Adam Boyce, Jun 11 '13 at 17:21
In fact, you wouldn't have needed to do this in VB6! That was just busy-code. — Mark Bertenshaw, Jun 12 '13 at 06:54

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 11 '13 at 17:21

7

I would not care too much about this. .Net is a managed, garbage-collected environment. I'm pretty sure the CLR will take care of collecting these objects for you when they're no longer needed.

As a general rule, you should only worry about these kind of things when you're getting a hold of unmanaged resources (such as files, DB Connections, COM objects, etc.). In that case, you may want to implement IDisposable and properly release all your objects / resources in the Dispose() method.

answered Jun 11 '13 at 17:21

Federico Berasategui

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It will be adding user access credentials from a DB Connection, but the container class itself isn't going to be managing the connections. So the CLR should handle it then? – Adam Boyce Jun 11 '13 at 17:33
@VK_Dev yes. for normal objects and classes, don't worry about setting them to `null`. .Net will handle that for you. – Federico Berasategui Jun 11 '13 at 17:34

Upgrade VB6 Container Class to VB.NET

1 Answers1