Hi all, in my goal to adopt better coding practices I have a few questions in general about automatic handling of code. I have heard different answers both from online and talking with other developers/programmers at my work. I am not sure if I should have split them into 3 questions, but they all seem sort of related:

1) How does .NET handle instances of classes and other code things that take up memory? I recently found out about using the factory pattern for certain things like service classes so that they are only instantiated once in the entire application, but then I was told that '.NET handles a lot of that stuff automatically when mentioning it.'

2) How does Nhibernate's session handle automatic clean-up of un-used things? I've seen some say that it is great at handling things automatically and you should just use a session factory and that's it, no need to close it. But I have also read and seem many examples where people close the hibernate session.

3) How does LINQ's datacontext handle this? Most of the time I never .disposed my datacontext's and the app didn't see to take a performance hit (though I am not running anything super intensively), but it seems like most people recommend disposing of your datacontext after you are done with it. However, I have seen many many code examples where the dispose method is never called. Also in general I found it kind of annoying that you couldn't access even one-deep child related objects after disposing of the datacontext unless you explicity also grabbed them in the query.

Thanks all. I am loving this site so far, I kind of get lost and spend hours just reading things on here. =)