Proper way to Dispose of a BackGroundWorker

BackgroundWorker derives from Component. Component implements the IDisposable interface. That in turn makes BackgroundWorker inherit the Dispose() method.

Deriving from Component is a convenience for Windows Forms programmers, they can drop a BGW from the toolbox onto a form. Components in general are somewhat likely to have something to dispose. The Windows Forms designer takes care of this automatically, look in the Designer.cs file for a Form for the "components" field. Its auto-generated Dispose() method calls the Dispose() method for all components.

However, BackgroundWorker doesn't actually have any member that requires disposing. It doesn't override Dispose(). Its base implementation, Component.Dispose(), only makes sure that the component is removed from the "components" collection. And raise the Disposed event. But doesn't otherwise dispose anything.

Long story short: if you dropped a BGW on a form then everything is taken care of automatically, you don't have to help. If you didn't drop it on a form then it isn't an element in a components collection and nothing needs to be done.

You don't have to call Dispose().

Late to the game, but I just ran across a scenario related to your question that I thought I would share. If you create your worker at the class level and reuse it on successive operations without closing the app, if you don't remove the events after completion they will increment and run multiple times on each successive execution.

worker.RunWorkerCompleted -= new RunWorkerCompletedEventHandler(worker_RunWorkerCompleted);worker.DoWork -= new DoWorkEventHandler(worker_DoWork);

Without the above my DoWork fires once the first time, twice the second time, etc. This is probably a no-brainer for most, but it took me a bit to figure it out, so hopefully this will help someone else out.

worker.Dispose() is not required, because Dispose() is automatically called. But before disposing the object you need to remove all events handlers.

This article informs us about this.

worker.RunWorkerCompleted -= new RunWorkerCompletedEventHandle(worker_RunWorkerCompleted);worker.DoWork -= new DoWorkEventHandler(worker_DoWork);