'Garbage Collector and Erratic Programming Errors

[Dennis]

I thought some might be interested in an erratic error that I finally found
in my program:

I had a class that opened a filestream for a file which I inadvertently
forgot to close after it was finished. The routine that used the class was
exited and the program went on about doing other things then the filestream
would again be opened to the same file by another routine to do other things
with the file. Sometimes when opening the filestream to the same file in
another part of the program, I would get an error that the file is in use by
another and sometimes I wouldn't get the error. It seemed to depend on how
much work the program did before it tried to open the file again. What was
happening was that when the Class that had originally opened the filestream
was no longer in use, the garbage collector would get around to closing the
filestream for me. Sometimes it was closed almost immediately and sometims a
few micro seconds later.

This was a very frustrating bug in my program to track down. Just thought
some might be interested in how the garbage collection process can end up
causing erratic operation of a program.
--
Dennis in Houston