The blog of dlaa.me

It was back in March of last year that I explained the motivation for the WeakEventListener class I'd started using in the Silverlight Toolkit's Data Visualization assembly. Since then, a few other Toolkit controls have added WeakEventListener where necessary - but otherwise not much has changed...

Then, a few days ago, I saw that Beat Kiener had written a post detailing the specifics of how WeakEventListener really works. Where I focused more on saying why WeakEventListener is necessary, Beat does a great job of showing why - with lots of pretty diagrams and a detailed explanation. He even identifies a mistake users of WeakEventListener might make and outlines a simple tweak to the original implementation to prevent it! Beat's post is a good read, and I recommend it for anyone who's interested in this stuff.

But wait, there's more! Beat followed with a post about a wrapper to simplify the common usage pattern shared by every WeakEventListener consumer. Whereas WeakEventListener is a little tricky to use correctly, Beat's wrapper is easy to get right - and still gets the job done! So if you've wanted to make use of WeakEventListener, but were intimidated by the technical details, please have a look at these two posts because I think you'll find it's really quite approachable. :)

PS - If you think you have a memory leak, but aren't sure, this post I wrote about using WinDbg, SOS, and GCRoot to diagnose .NET memory leaks may be helpful.