John Gomez

"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. Honestly, what could a five-month-old baby possibly know about the intricacies of garbage collectors and memory management? "Is that all?" she replied. "The .NET garbage collector is rather easy to... (more)

.NET Track - CLR Internals

When you run a .NET application, do you ever wonder about what goes on "under the hood?" Starting with a simple "Hello World" application, we will see exactly what happens when you compile your source code to IL. Next, we will trace the progress of the IL through the runtime as it executes. Finally, we will examine the complexities surrounding external dependencies and Code Access Securi... (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 ... (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 y... (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 l... (more)