The .NET / COM interop is well designed, and works correctly. In particular, the .NET Garbage Collector correctly tracks COM references, and will correctly release COM objects when they have no remaining runtime references. Interfering with the reference counts of COM object by calling Marshal.ReleaseComObject(...) or Marshal.FinalReleaseComObject(...) is a dangerous but common anti-pattern. Unfortunately, some of the bad advice came out of Microsoft.
Your .NET code can correctly interact with COM while ignoring all 5 of your rules.
If you do need to trigger deterministic clean-up of COM objects that are no longer referenced from the runtime, you can safely force a GC (and possibly wait for finalizers to complete). Otherwise, you don’t have to do anything special in your code, to deal with COM objects.
There is one important caveat, that might have contributed to confusion about role of the garbage collector. When debugging .NET code, local variables artificially have their lifetime extended to the end of the method, in order to support watching the variabled under the debugger. That means you might still have managed references to a COM object (and hence the GC won’t clean up) later than expect form just looking at the code. A good workaround for this issue (which only occurs under the debugger) is to split the scope of COM calls from the GC cleanup calls.
As an example, here is some C# code that interacts with Excel, and cleans up properly. You can paste into a Console application (just add a reference to Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel):
using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel;
namespace TestCsCom
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
// NOTE: Don't call Excel objects in here...
// Debugger would keep alive until end, preventing GC cleanup
// Call a separate function that talks to Excel
DoTheWork();
// Now let the GC clean up (repeat, until no more)
do
{
GC.Collect();
GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers();
}
while (Marshal.AreComObjectsAvailableForCleanup());
}
static void DoTheWork()
{
Application app = new Application();
Workbook book = app.Workbooks.Add();
Worksheet worksheet = book.Worksheets["Sheet1"];
app.Visible = true;
for (int i = 1; i <= 10; i++) {
worksheet.Cells.Range["A" + i].Value = "Hello";
}
book.Save();
book.Close();
app.Quit();
// NOTE: No calls the Marshal.ReleaseComObject() are ever needed
}
}
}
You’ll see that the Excel process properly shuts down, indicating that all the COM objects were properly cleaned up.
VSTO does not change any of these issues – it is just a .NET library that wraps and extends the native Office COM object model.
There is a lot of false information and confusion about this issue, including many posts on MSDN and on StackOverflow.
What finally convinced me to have a closer look and figure out the right advice was this post https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2010/03/01/marshal-releasecomobject-considered-dangerous/ together with finding the issue with references kept alive under the debugger on a StackOverflow answer.
One exception to this general guidance is when the COM object model requires interfaces to be released in a particular order. The GC approach described here does not give you control over the order in which the COM objects are released by the GC.
I don’t have any reference to indicate whether this would violate the COM contract. In general, I would expect COM hierarchies to use internal references to ensure any dependencies on the sequence are properly managed. E.g. in the case of Excel, one would expect a Range object to keep an internal reference to the parent Worksheet object, so that a user of the object model need not explicitly keep both alive.
There may be cases where even the Office applications are sensitive to the sequence in which COM objects are released. One case seems to be when the OLE embedding is used – see https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vsofficedeveloper/2008/04/11/excel-ole-embedding-errors-if-you-have-managed-add-in-sinking-application-events-in-excel-2/
So it would be possible to create a COM object model that fails if objects are released in the wrong sequence, and the interop with such a COM model would then require some more care, and might need manual interference with the references.
But for general interop with the Office COM object models, I agree with the VS blog post calling “Marshal.ReleaseComObject – a problem disguised as a solution”.