title: Does assigning to Nothing cause Dispose to be invoked?
body: <p>I recently saw some VB .NET code as follows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Dim service = ...
  Try
     ...
     service.Close()
  Finally
     service = Nothing
  End Try
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Does assigning Nothing to service do anything? If it is a garbage collection issue, I am assuming that when "service" went out of scope the referenced object would be garbage collected and the dispose method called on the object.</p>
  
  <p>It seems to me that assigning this variable Nothing can't really do anything, as there could be another reference to the object around so the reference counts haev to be checked anyways.</p>