Destructors provide an implicit way of freeing unmanaged resources encapsulated in your class, they get called when the GC gets around to it and they implicitly call the Finalize method of the base class. If you're using a lot of unmanaged resources it is better to provide an explicit way of freeing those resources via the IDisposable interface. See the C# programming guide: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/66x5fx1b.aspx