DicomConnection objects are automatically added and deleted from an internal list as they are created or deleted, and the collection returned by this property contains all those active at the time it is retrieved, but this collection is not updated subsequently. There is an automatic mechanism within DicomObjects for performing a graceful shutdown of associations when the corresponding DicomConnection object has no further references to it. This is temporarily inhibited while the object returned by this property is in existence, so the object returned should be used and released reasonably quickly (a few seconds does not matter, but it should not be a global variable).