There is no such thing. When you go out of some context so you loose the references to some reference objects, the objects are considered as logically nonexistent. As .NET uses garbage-collected (managed) memory, these objects will be scheduled for destruction and their allocated memory will be eventually reclaimed. This is called
reachability, which is a non-trivial concept. The object is protected from destruction as soon as it is reachable. It does not have to have a name. An object can be reachable as a member of array, collection or any other container. You are the one who is responsible for keeping the references, as a developer.
Please see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_%28computer_science%29#Reachability_of_an_object[
^].
An object can be referenced using a
weak reference which does not prevent a garbage collector (GC) to collect referenced objects having no regular (non-weak) references. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_reference[
^].
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.weakreference.aspx[
^].
By the way, in the systems without garbage collection, there is also no access the heap objects not reachable from the application code. In such systems is simply leads to memory leaks. The developer is responsible for keeping track of all objects created on heap. For example, in C++ one can override the "new" operator and collect pointers to the allocated memory, but usually the deletion of objects is done at the exit from some scope.
You really need to understand such things if you want to do software development.
—SA
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