Welcome!

John Gomez

Subscribe to John Gomez: eMailAlertsEmail Alerts
Get John Gomez via: homepageHomepage mobileMobile rssRSS facebookFacebook twitterTwitter linkedinLinkedIn


Top Stories by John Gomez

There are places in this universe were mortals fear to tread ­ dark mysterious places replete with shadowy cliffs, hidden treasures, and rumors of spiritual powers. These places are best left to wizards, hobbits, and elves ­ and those few who have an unbridled passion for adventure, challenge, and conquest. Right now you are either intrigued by where this is going or completely flabbergasted as to what possible relationship this introduction could have to Microsoft's .NET. Well, if you observe some developers and how they approach learning their craft, you would think that making sense of the internal aspects of this technology is best left to programming gurus and those few crusaders who dare to tread in the .NET netherworld. The reality is that understanding the internals of .NET isn't all that difficult or mysterious, and having good insight into things like garb... (more)

Marissa's Guide to the .NET Garbage Collector

"What's wrong, Uncle John?" I hadn't realized how my facial expressions were illustrating my inner feelings. I had been working on a new coding project, and as I worked I became more and more amazed by the native memory management provided by .NET. It seemed that almost by magic the runtime was able to figure out which objects were no longer needed and which should hang around, and - yet more amazing - it could even call special cleanup routines. "Nothing is wrong, Marissa; I just wish I had time to dive into the automatic memory management features of .NET," I replied hastily. Ho... (more)

Marissa's Guide to the .NET Garbage Collector, part 2

When we left Marissa last month she was getting rather cranky, but now she is well rested and ready to get down to business. And that business is how Microsoft .NET manages memory through the use of what is commonly known as the garbage collector or GC. In the first article in this series [.NETDJ, Vol. 1, issue 8] we discussed some of the basic concepts behind the garbage collector. If you haven't had a chance to read that article, now would be a good time - before you look over the following explanations and advice from Marissa, my six-month-old niece, who is known far and wide ... (more)

Exception Handling From the Inside Out

From the perspective of most programmers, the ability to raise an exception is typically a rather straightforward set of semantics that allows your program to react to an unexpected situation. But as with most things related to .NET, there are a variety of under-the-covers "happenings" that allow your particular programming language to implement a common service without sacrificing the language's usability or flexibility. Gaining an understanding of structured exception handling (SEH) will not only help you to develop systems that are robust, but will also serve as a good introd... (more)

The Science of Threading

In Part 1 of this series (.NETDJ, Vol. 1, issue 12) we explored some basic background in regard to .NET threading. We explored concepts related to threads in general, their appropriate usage, and how to work with the thread pool in .NET as an alternative to managing our own threads. This month we will build on what we know and dive deeper into .NET threading. We have a lot to cover, so let's get started. Threads: Rolling Your Own. The easiest way for you to learn about threads is to just jump in and get your hands dirty. Before we go any further, let's look at some code. I've cr... (more)