Should we call Dispose() on a Dataset?

During one of my code reviews, I saw that the development team had called 'Dispose()' on all the datasets used in the application. I knew that the Dataset was a disconnected managed object and could not understand what the dispose method would actually be doing? Dispose() is typically called to release unmanaged resources such as file-pointers, streams, socket connections, etc. In most cases, such classes also expose a Close() method that is more appropriate.

Discussions with the developers revealed that FxCop also throws an error when Dispose() is not called on Datasets.
Further investigation revleaded that the Dataset exposes the Dispose() method as a side effect of inheritance. The Dataset class inherits from the MarshalByValueComponent which implements the IDisposable interface because it is a component. The method is not overridden in the System.Data.Dataset class and the default implementation is in the MarshalByValueComponent class. The default implementation just removes the component from the parent container it is in. But in case of Dataset, there are no parent containers and hence the Dispose() method does nothing useful.

Conclusion: It is not necessary to call Dispose() on Datasets. Developers can safely ignore the FxCop warnings too :)