What is the correct way to dispose elements held inside a ThreadLocal<IDisposable>?

I had a look at the code in ThreadLocal<T> to see what the current Dispose is doing and it appears to be a lot of voodoo. Obviously disposing of thread-related stuff.

But it doesn't dispose of the values if T itself is disposable.

Now, I have a solution - a ThreadLocalDisposables<T> class, but before I give the full definition it's worth thinking about what should happen if you wrote this code:

var tl = new ThreadLocalDisposables<IExpensiveDisposableResource>();
tl.Value = myEdr1;
tl.Value = myEdr2;
tl.Dispose();

Should both myEdr1 & myEdr2 both be disposed? Or just myEdr2? Or should myEdr1 be disposed when myEdr2 was assigned?

It's not clear to me what the semantics should be.

It is clear to me, however, that if I wrote this code:

var tl = new ThreadLocalDisposables<IExpensiveDisposableResource>(
    () => new ExpensiveDisposableResource());
tl.Value.DoSomething();
tl.Dispose();

Then I would expect that the resource created by the factory for each thread should be disposed of.

So I'm not going to allow the direct assignment of the disposable value for ThreadLocalDisposables and only allow the factory constructor.

Here's ThreadLocalDisposables:

public class ThreadLocalDisposables<T> : IDisposable
    where T : IDisposable
{
    private ThreadLocal<T> _threadLocal = null;
    private ConcurrentBag<T> _values = new ConcurrentBag<T>();

    public ThreadLocalDisposables(Func<T> valueFactory)
    {
        _threadLocal = new ThreadLocal<T>(() =>
        {
            var value = valueFactory();
            _values.Add(value);
            return value;
        });
    }

    public void Dispose()
    {
        _threadLocal.Dispose();
        Array.ForEach(_values.ToArray(), t => t.Dispose());
    }

    public override string ToString()
    {
        return _threadLocal.ToString();
    }

    public bool IsValueCreated
    {
        get { return _threadLocal.IsValueCreated; }
    }

    public T Value
    {
        get { return _threadLocal.Value; }
    }
}

Does this help?

In .NET 4.5, the Values property was added to ThreadLocal<> to deal with the problem of manually managing the lifetime of ThreadLocal objects. It returns a list of all current instances bound to that ThreadLocal variable.

An example using a Parallel.For loop accessing a ThreadLocal database connection pool was presented in this MSDN article. The relevant code snippet is below.

var threadDbConn = new ThreadLocal<MyDbConnection>(() => MyDbConnection.Open(), true);
try
{
    Parallel.For(0, 10000, i =>
    {
        var inputData = threadDbConn.Value.GetData(i);
        ...
    });
}
finally
{
    foreach(var dbConn in threadDbConn.Values)
    {
        dbConn.Close();
    }
}

Normally when you don't explicitly dispose of a class that holds an unmanaged resource, the garbage collector will eventually run and dispose of it. For this to happen, the class has to have a finalizer that disposes of its resource. Your sample class doesn't have a finalizer.

Now, to dispose of a class that's held inside a ThreadLocal<T> where T is IDisposable you also have to do it yourself. ThreadLocal<T> is just a wrapper, it won't attempt to guess what's the correct behavior for its wrapped reference when it is itself disposed. The class could, e.g., survive its thread local storage.