What is the correct way to dispose of a WPF window?

I have a WPF window which I am creating from another window by calling Show(), then letting it Close() itself. When the window closes, I expect it to die, call its destructor, and delete all its child elements (such as timers..).

What is the correct way of invoking such an action?

Close() releases all unmanaged resources, and closes all owned Windows.

Any other managed resources you need deterministic disposal of should be handled from the Closed event.

Reference

(note: deleted previous answer, it was a completely wrong guess)

There are very few WPF elements that actually need to be explicitly disposed, unlike in Windows Forms.

In the case of Window, calling Close() is sufficient to dispose all managed and unmanaged resources accorrding to the documentation.

Just in case, I'll add my two cents.

My problem was that I didn't do enough troubleshooting. My window was a child window that could be opened, closed, and re-opened, so I added the following to keep it from closing completely:

private void Window_Closing(object sender, System.ComponentModel.CancelEventArgs e) {
  e.Cancel = true;
  this.Hide();
}

However, when Window.Close was called, it only hid the window. I eventually caught on and added the following:

private void Window_Closing(object sender, System.ComponentModel.CancelEventArgs e) {
  e.Cancel = true;
  this.Hide();
}

public void Close() {
  this.Closing -= Window_Closing;
  //Add closing logic here.
  base.Close();
}

This works fine - it removes the event handler preventing the window from being closed, and then closes it.

Closing the window and being confident that you have released all resources to it and any of its children will cause all well behaved elements in the logic tree to be garbage collected.

I say "well behaved" because it's theoretically possible to have an element that does something like create a thread that isn't stopped properly, but in practice if you're using the basic WPF framework and well written controls, you should be fine to just release everything.