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How to know if winform form has been garbage collected?

I'm using C# but probably the same in VB.NET. I C++ I would just set a break-point on an objects destructor to know when/if it was deleted/free'd. I understand that in winforms the base class calls SupressFinalize so that form destructors are never called, so I guess I can't do it that way. Is there another method to know if an object has been garbage collected? It seems like a catch-22 because if there was you would probably need a reference to check, but by holding that reference the garbage collected will not crush it.
I've read this What strategies and tools are useful for finding memory leaks in .NET?, and I understand there are tools and/or frameworks out there to handle this "big picture" and I'm sure in a few weeks I'll be trying out several of these methods. For now I just have a really strong feeling I might have a leak related to forms not being deleted, so just want to check this one thing (and I want to know just for the sake of knowing).
I know I can watch Dispose, but I'm pretty sure Dispose can be called but still end up with the form object still being around. To test that theory I created a known-issue where I registered for a callback event in my form, then closed the form without unregistering it. Sure enough, Dispose was called (and "disposing" was true), but later when the event was fired, it still hit my break-point inside the form that was supposedly disposed already.

There are really two issues here:
As for your original question, you can use a WeakReference to monitor an object's existence without affecting its lifetime.
Your underlying question suggests that you have a misunderstanding of what garbage collection is, and how it works. The point of garbage collection is that you should never care if an object has been collected or not. Instead, you should focus on the references to the object, and if they have been reassigned or made inaccessible from rooted references. Don't worry about the instance, worry about the references to it.

The entire concept of a managed language is that you don't need to care when an object is actually garbage collected. Lots and lots of time and effort go into the GC to make sure that it doesn't collect objects that it shouldn't, that it doesn't leave objects that it should collect (when it decides to do a pass over the generation that it's in) and that all of this is done reasonably efficiently. This means that if an object consumes a large amount of managed resources and also implements IDisposable (say, a DataTable or DataSet) is disposed it is still consuming a lat of memory, and disposing of it doesn't make it get garbage collected any quicker (although you should still dispose of it to ensure any managed resources go away).
The GC is built to work best when you leave it alone and let it do it's job rather than interfering with it by trying to, for example, manually cause collections to take place. This is occasionally useful for debugging purposes or learning about your program/the language, but it virtually never belongs in a production application.
Disposing has nothing to do with garbage collection or collecting an object. Disposing is the mechanism in place for dealing with a managed object that is holding onto an unmangaed resource (or another object that is holding onto an unmangaed resource). Disposing of the object is telling it to clear up that unmanaged resource, but it has nothing to do with the garbage collector freeing the managed resources of that object. The destructor is there so that you don't free the managed resources before freeing the unmanaged resources, but it's perfectly acceptable (and in fact should always happen) that the unmanaged resources are cleaned up (via dispose) before the managed resource is freed.
Now, it is still possible, given all of this, for a program to have a memory leak, but there are a few questions you really need to be asking yourself first. How large is the leak? Is it a one off, continuous over time, every time we do function X, etc? What would it take for the program to consume so much memory as to be disruptive (either run out of memory, cause other programs to run out of memory, etc) and is that likely to occur with common or legitimate uses of the program? Usually you don't need to start asking these types of questions until you start getting out of memory exceptions, or notice that you start running out of physical memory for a program that oughtn't to. If you notice these problems then you can start looking around for objects that implement IDisposable that aren't being disposed, to see if you're holding onto references to very large objects (or collections of objects) that you no longer need, etc.
Sorry for the wall of text.

Why is it always necessary to implement IDisposable on an object that has an IDisposable member?

From what I can tell, it is an accepted rule that if you have a class A that has a member m that is IDisposable, A should implement IDisposable and it should call m.Dispose() inside of it.
I can't find a satisfying reason why this is the case.
I understand the rule that if you have unmanaged resources, you should provide a finalizer along with IDisposable so that if the user doesn't explicitly call Dispose, the finalizer will still clean up during GC.
However, with that rule in place, it seems like you shouldn't need to have the rule that this question is about. For instance...
If I have a class:
class MyImage{
private Image _img;
... }
Conventions states that I should have MyImage : IDisposable. But if Image has followed conventions and implemented a finalizer and I don't care about the timely release of resources, what's the point?
UPDATE
Found a good discussion on what I was trying to get at here.

But if Image has followed conventions and implemented a finalizer and I don't care about the timely release of resources, what's the point?
You've missed the point of Dispose entirely. It's not about your convenience. It's about the convenience of other components that might want to use those unmanaged resources. Unless you can guarantee that no other code in the system cares about the timely release of resources, and the user doesn't care about timely release of resources, you should release your resources as soon as possible. That's the polite thing to do.
In the classic Prisoner's Dilemma, a lone defector in a world of cooperators gains a huge benefit. But in your case, being a lone defector produces only the tiny benefit of you personally saving a few minutes by writing low-quality, best-practice-ignoring code. It's your users and all the programs they use that suffer, and you gain practically nothing. Your code takes advantage of the fact that other programs unlock files and release mutexes and all that stuff. Be a good citizen and do the same for them. It's not hard to do, and it makes the whole software ecosystem better.
UPDATE: Here is an example of a real-world situation that my team is dealing with right now.
We have a test utility. It has a "handle leak" in that a bunch of unmanaged resources aren't aggressively disposed; it's leaking maybe half a dozen handles per "task". It maintains a list of "tasks to do" when it discovers disabled tests, and so on. We have ten or twenty thousand tasks in this list, so we very quickly end up with so many outstanding handles -- handles that should be dead and released back into the operating system -- that soon none of the code in the system that is not related to testing can run. The test code doesn't care. It works just fine. But eventually the code being tested can't make message boxes or other UI and the entire system either hangs or crashes.
The garbage collector has no reason to know that it needs to run finalizers more aggressively to release those handles sooner; why should it? Its job is to manage memory. Your job is to manage handles, so you've got to do that job.

But if Image has followed conventions
and implemented a finalizer and I
don't care about the timely release of
resources, what's the point?
Then there isn't one, if you don't care about timely release, and you can ensure that the disposable object is written correct (in truth I never make an assumption like that, not even with MSs code. You never know when something accidentally slipped by). The point is that you should care, as you never know when it will cause a problem. Think about an open database connection. Leaving it hanging around, means that it isn't replaced in the pool. You can run out if you have several requests come in for one.
Nothing says you have to do it if you don't care. Think of it this way, it's like releasing variables in an unmanaged program. You don't have to, but it is highly advisable. If for no other reason the person inheriting from the program doesn't have to wonder why it wasn't taken care of and then try and clear it up.

Firstly, there's no guaranteeing when an object will be cleaned up by the finalizer thread - think about the case where a class has a reference to a sql connection. Unless you make sure this is disposed of promptly, you'll have a connection open for an unknown period of time - and you won't be able to reuse it.
Secondly, finalization is not a cheap process - you should be making sure that if your objects are disposed of properly you're calling GC.SuppressFinalize(this) to prevent finalization happening.
Expanding on the "not cheap" aspect, the finalizer thread is a high-priority thread. It will take resources away from your main application if you give it too much to do.
Edit: Ok, here's a blog article by Chris Brummie about Finalization, including why it is expensive. (I knew I'd read loads about this somewhere)

If you don't care about the timely release of resources, then indeed there is no point. If you can be sure that the code is only for your consumption and you've got plenty of free memory/resources why not let GC hoover it up when it chooses to. OTOH, if someone else is using your code and creating many instances of (e.g.) MyImage, it's going to be pretty difficult to control memory/resource usage unless it disposes nicely.

Many classes require that Dispose be called to ensure correctness. If some C# code uses an iterator with a "finally" block, for example, the code in that block will not run if an enumerator is created with that iterator and not disposed. While there a few cases where it would be impractical to ensure objects were cleaned up without finalizers, for the most part code which relies upon finalizers for correct operation or to avoid memory leaks is bad code.
If your code acquires ownership of an IDisposable object, then unless either the object's cleass is sealed or your code creates the object by calling a constructor (as opposed to a factory method) you have no way of knowing what the real type of the object is, and whether it can be safely abandoned. Microsoft may have originally intended that it should be safe to abandon any type of object, but that is unrealistic, and the belief that it should be safe to abandon any type of object is unhelpful. If an object subscribes to events, allowing for safe abandonment will require either adding a level of weak indirection to all events, or a level of (non-weak) indirection to all other accesses. In many cases, it's better to require that a caller Dispose an object correctly than to add significant overhead and complexity to allow for abandonment.
Note also, btw, that even when objects try to accommodate abandonment it can still be very expensive. Create a Microsoft.VisualBasic.Collection (or whatever it's called), add a few objects, and create and Dispose a million enumerators. No problem--executes very quickly. Now create and abandon a million enumeartors. Major snooze fest unless you force a GC every few thousand enumerators. The Collection object is written to allow for abandonment, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a major cost.

If an object you're using implements IDisposable, it's telling you it has something important to do when you're finished with it. That important thing may be to release unmanaged resources, or unhook from events so that it doesn't handle events after you think you're done with it, etc, etc. By not calling the Dispose, you're saying that you know better about how that object operates than the original author. In some tiny edge cases, this may actually be true, if you authored the IDisposable class yourself, or you know of a bug or performance problem related to calling Dispose. In general, it's very unlikely that ignoring a class requesting you to dispose it when you're done is a good idea.
Talking about finalizers - as has been pointed out, they have a cost, which can be avoided by Disposing the object (if it uses SuppressFinalize). Not just the cost of running the finalizer itself, and not just the cost of having to wait till that finalizer is done before the GC can collect the object. An object with a finalizer survives the collection in which it is identified as being unused and needing finalization. So it will be promoted (if it's not already in gen 2). This has several knock on effects:
The next higher generation will be collected less frequently, so after the finalizer runs, you may be waiting a long time before the GC comes around to that generation and sweeps your object away. So it can take a lot longer to free memory.
This adds unnecessary pressure to the collection the object is promoted to. If it's promoted from gen 0 to gen 1, then now gen 1 will fill up earlier than it needs to.
This can lead to more frequent garbage collections at higher generations, which is another performance hit.
If the object's finalizer isn't completed by the time the GC comes around to the higher generation, the object can be promoted again. Hence in a bad case you can cause an object to be promoted from gen 0 to gen 2 without good reason.
Obviously if you're only doing this on one object it's not likely to cost you anything noticeable. If you're doing it as general practice because you find calling Dispose on objects you're using tiresome, then it can lead to all of the problems above.
Dispose is like a lock on a front door. It's probably there for a reason, and if you're leaving the building, you should probably lock the door. If it wasn't a good idea to lock it, there wouldn't be a lock.

Even if you don't care in this particular case, you should still follow the standard because you will care in some cases. It's much easier to set a standard and follow it always based on specific guidelines than have a standard that you sometimes disregard. This is especially true as your team grows and your product ages.

C# - Preparing An Object For GC Before Calling GC.Collect

Scenario
Lets say that I've decided I really need to call GC.Collect();
What do I need to do to ensure that an object is prepared to be garbage collected appropriately before I actually call this method?
Would assigning null to all properties of the object be enough? Or just assigning null to the object itself?
If you really need to know why.....
I have a distributed application in WCF that sends a DataContract over the wire every few seconds, containing 8 Dictionaries as DataMembers.
This is a lot of data and when it comes into the Client-side interface, a whole new DataContract object is created and the memory usage of the application is growing so big that I'm getting OutOfMemory Exceptions.
Thanks
EDIT
Thanks for all the comments and answers, it seems that everyone shares the same opinion.
What I cannot understand is how I can possibly dispose correctly because the connection is open constantly.
Once I've copied the data over from the incoming object, I don't need the object anymore, so would simply implementing IDisposable on that DataContract object be enough?
My original problem is here - Distributed OutOfMemory Exceptions

As long as nothing else can see the object it is already eligible for collection; nothing more is required. The key point here is to ensure that nothing else is watching it (or at least, nothing with a longer lifetime):
is it in a field somewhere?
is it in a variable in a method that is incomplete? (an infinite loop or iterator block, perhaps)
is it in a collection somewhere?
has it subscribed to some event?
it is captured in a closure (lambda / anon-method) that is still alive?
I genuinely doubt that GC.Collect() is the answer here; if it was eligible it would have already been collected. If it isn't elgible, calling GC.Collect() certainly won't help and quite possibly will make things worse (by tying up CPU when nothing useful can be collected).

You don't generally need to do anything.
If the object is no longer referenced then it's a candidate for collection. (And, conversely, if the object is still referenced then it's not a candidate for collection, however you "prepare" it.)

You need to clean up any unmanaged resources like database connections etc.
Typically by implementing IDisposable and call Dispose.
If you have a finalizer you should call GC.SuppressFinilize.
The rest is cleaned up by the garbage collector.
Edit:
And, oh, naturally you need to release all references to your object.
But, and here is this big but. Unless you have a very very special case you don't need to call GC.Collect. You probably forgets to release some resources or references, and GC.Collect won't help you with that. Make sure you call Dispose on everything Disposable (preferably with the using-pattern).
You should probably pick up a memory profiler like Ants memory profiler and look where all your memory has gone.

If you have no more direct reference to an object, and you're running out of memory, GC should do this automatically. Do make sure you call .Dispose() on your datacontext.

Calling GC.Collect will hardly ever prevent you from getting OutOfMemory exceptions, because .NET will call GC.Collect itself when it is unable to create a new object due to OOM. There is only one scenario where I can think of and that is when you have unreferenced objects that are registered in the finalizable queue. When these objects reference many other objects it can cause a OOM. The solution to this problem is actually not to call GC.Collect but to ensure that those objects are disposed correctly (and implement the dispose pattern correctly when you created those objects).

Using GC.Collect in general
Since you are trying to get rid of a very large collection, it's totally valid to use GC.Collect(). From the Microsoft docs:
... since your application knows more about its behavior than the runtime does, you could help matters by explicitly forcing some collections. For example, it might make sense for your application to force a full collection of all generations after the user saves his data file.
"Preparing" your objects
From the excellent Performance Considerations for Run-Time Technologies in the .NET Framework (from MSDN):
If you keep a pointer to a resource around, the GC has no way of knowing if you intend to use it in the future. What this means is that all of the rules you've used in native code for explicitly freeing objects still apply, but most of the time the GC will handle everything for you.
So, to ensure it's ready for GC, Make sure that you have no references to the objects you wish to collect (e.g. in collections, events, etc...). Setting the variable to null will mean it's ready for collection before the variable goes out of scope.
Also any object which implements IDisposable should have it's Dispose() method called to clean up unmanaged resources.
Before you use GC.Collect
Since it looks like your application is a server, using the Server GC may resolve your issue. It will likely run more often and be more performant in a multi-processor scenario.
The server GC is designed for maximum throughput, and scales with very high performance.
See the Choosing Which Garbage Collector to Use within Performance Considerations for Run-Time Technologies in the .NET Framework (from MSDN):

Memory management - C# VS Objective C?

SO I already know about memory management in objective C, and I never had to know about it while programming in .net (C#). But i still have some questions about how everything is done.
-Why does the code leak in objective c if we allocate an object and not release it?
-Why doesn't this leak in C#?
-What are some advantages and disadvantages of automatic-garbage-collecting?
-Why not use autorelease on every allocated object (Objective C)?
-Is it possible to take care of the memory manually (C#)? so let's say i instantiate an object, and when I'm done i want to release it, and i don't want to wait for the garbage collector to do it?

It leaks in Objective-C because Objective-C doesn’t take any action on it. It relies on you doing all the work. It doesn’t leak in C# (more precisely, in .NET) because it employs a garbage collector which cleans up objects that are no longer used.
The main advantage of garbage collection is the above: you have far fewer memory leaks. (It’s still possible to have a memory leak, e.g. by filling a list indefinitely, but that’s harder to do accidentally.) It used to be thought that garbage collection has a disadvantage in that it could slow down the program because it keeps doing the garbage collection in the background and you have little control over it. In reality, however, the difference is negligible: there are other background tasks on your computer (e.g. device drivers) running all the time, the garbage collector doesn’t break the camel’s back either.
Auto-deallocation (as it is employed in C++ when a non-pointer variable goes out of scope) is dangerous because it opens the possibility to have a reference to it still in existence even after the object has been disposed. If your code then tries to access the object, the process goes kaboom big time.
Yes, it is possible to tell C# to release memory by invoking the garbage collector directly (GC.Collect()). However, I have yet to see a case where this is at all necessary. If you actually run out of memory, the garbage collector will already kick in automatically and free as much as it can.

Objective-C isn't a garbage-collected language, so it has no way of knowing that an object won't be used anymore unless you tell it. That's the purpose of the .NET garbage collector: it checks to see which objects can no longer be used by the program, and- at some point- gets rid of them to free up memory. There are no guarantees as to when, or if, it will ever free any given abandoned object; it's just trying to keep memory usage from going out of control.
C# can't release an object without the garbage collector. If you release an object that's still being referenced, your program is going to crash when you try to use that. Which is always the risk of manual memory management, but like all "memory-managed languages", it is trying to prevent you from making exactly that mistake. If you want to explicitly shut down an object's operation, implement the interface IDisposable for that object's type, and use the Dispose() method on that object- essentially a destructor. Be sure you're done with it, of course, and that the object will behave correctly (by throwing exceptions) if something tries to use it after it's been Dispose()d of.
Objective-C is reference-counted. When an object is out of references, it deletes itself. It's not a bad solution to the "is someone still using this object?" problem, except for data structures that refer to themselves; circular data structures will hang around forever unless carefully handled. .NET isn't a reference counter, so it will get rid of circular data structures that can't be reached from running code.
Autorelease is just a "release later", for returning a value that should self-destruct if the code that grabs it doesn't immediately want to hold onto it, as far as I understand. (I'm not an Objective-C programmer, though.) It gets around the "who releases this object?" problem for calls that return an object, without destroying it before the function is finished. It's a special use case, though, and it doesn't make sense in most other cases.

The advantage of automatic garbage collection is that you do not have to explicitly free/release your objects as you said. The disadvantage is you cannot be sure when (or even if) any given object instance will be released.
C# has other mechanisms to release other resources like files, or db connections that have to be released detirminitely. For example, using allows you to make sure that IDispose is called on an object for sure.
Garbage collected systems tend to have more memory in use at any given time than a well tuned manual implementation. Of course, you do not have memory leaks.
The quality and performance of garbage collectors can vary quite a bit which is something you may not have a lot of control over. For example, there may be a noticable lag when the GC runs. In .NET, you can call GC.Collect() to tell the GC that now would be a good time but it may or may not listen.
These days Objective-C is also garbage collected on the Mac. On the iPhone it is reference counted though so I assume that is where you are running into the issue.
On garbage collected systems, you can still run into the issue where a an object hangs onto a reference to an object that you would expect to be garbage collected. The garbage collector will not clean-up this up and so the memory is essentially leaked.
In reference counted systems, you do not have to keep track of every object that points at your object instances but you do have to specify that you want them released.
EDIT: I guess I did not say this explicitly - you cannot manually control memory allocation in C#.

How do you get rid of an object in c#

In the following c# code, how do I get rid of the objects when it's no longer useful? Does it get taken care of automatically, or do I need to do something?
public void Test()
{
object MyObject = new object();
... code ...
}

Automatically. When MyObject goes out of scope (at the end of Test), it's flagged for garbage collection. At some point in the future, the .NET runtime will clean up the memory for you
Edit:
(I should point out for the sake of completeness that if you pass MyObject somewhere, it gets passed by reference, and will not be garbage collected - it's only when no more references to the object are floating around that the GC is free to collect it)
Edit: in a release build, MyObject will usually be collected as soon as it's unused (see my answer for more details --dp)

The short answer is: unless it has unmanaged resources (file handles etc) you don't need to worry.
The long answer is a bit more involved.
When .NET decides it wants to free up some memory, it runs the garbage collector. This looks for all the objects which are still in use, and marks them as such. Any local variable (in any stack frame of any thread) which may still be read counts as a root as do static variables. (In fact I believe that static variables are referenced via live Type objects, which are referenced via live AppDomain objects, but for the most part you can regard static variables as roots.)
The garbage collector looks at each object referred to by a root, and then finds more "live" references based on the instance variables within those objects. It recurses down, finding and marking more and more objects as "live". Once it's finished this process, it can then look at all the rest of the objects and free them.
That's a very broad conceptual picture - but it gets a lot more detailed when you think of the generational model of garbage collection, finalizers, concurrent collection etc. I strongly recommend that you read Jeff Richter's CLR via C# which goes into this in a lot of detail. He also has a two part article (back from 2000, but still very relevant) if you don't want to buy the book.
Of course all this doesn't mean you don't need to worry about memory usage and object lifetimes in .NET. In particular:
Creating objects pointlessly will cost performance. In particular, the garbage collector is fast but not free. Look for simple ways to reduce your memory usage as you code, but micro-optimising before you know you have a problem is also bad.
It's possible to "leak" memory by making objects reachable for longer than you intended. Two reasonably common causes of this are static variables and event subscriptions. (An event subscription makes the event handler reachable from the event publisher, but not the other way round.)
If you use more memory (in a live, reachable way) than you have available, your app will crash. There's not a lot .NET can do to prevent that!
Objects which use non-memory resources typically implement IDisposable. You should call Dispose on them to release those resources when you're finished with the object. Note that this doesn't free the object itself - only the garbage collector can do that. The using statement in C# is the most convenient way of calling Dispose reliably, even in the face of an exception.

The other answers are correct, unless your object is an instance of a class which implements the IDisposable interface, in which case you ought to (explicitly, or implicitly via a using statement) call the object's Dispose method.

In optimized code, it is possible and likely that MyObject will be collected before the end of the method. By default, the debug configuration in Visual Studio will build with the debug switch on and the optimize switch off which means that MyObject will be kept to the end of the method (so that you can look at the value while debugging). Building with optimize off (debug doesn't matter in this case) allows MyObject to be collected after it's determined to be unused. One way to force it to stay alive to the end of the method is to call GC.KeepAlive(MyObject) at the end of the method.

This will force the garbage collector to get rid of unused objects.
GC.Collect();
GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers();
If you want a specific object to be collected.
object A = new Object();
...
A = null;
GC.collect();
GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers();

It gets taken care of automatically.

Typically garbage collection can be depended on to cleanup, but if your object contains any unmanaged resources (database connections, open files etc) you will need to explicitly close those resources and/or exceute the dispose method on the object (if it implements IDisposable). This can lead to bugs so you need to be careful how you deal with these types of objects. Simply closing a file after using it is not always sufficient since an exception before the close executes will leave the file open. Either use a using block or a try-finally block.
Bottom line: "using" is your friend.