I know the answer (it's 42)

A blog on coding, .NET, .NET Compact Framework and life in general....

Some things I have learnt about SW development

Working in the developer division is very exciting because I can relate so well with the customers....

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 12/21/2009

NETCF: Count your bytes correctly

I got a stress related issue reported in which the code tried allocating a 5MB array and do some...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 12/03/2009

Silverlight: Where are my colors

  The Silverlight System.Windows.Media.Colors class is a trimmer counterpart of the WPF Colors...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 11/17/2009

Global variables are bad

<This post is about C++ (C# folks are saved from this pain)> One of our devs taking care of...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 09/11/2009

.NET Compact Framework BCL < .NET BCL

Over twitter some folks are regularly discussing about the fact that there are some chunks of...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 09/08/2009

NETCF: GC and thread blocking

One of our customers asked us a bunch of questions on the NETCF garbage collector that qualifies as...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 09/02/2009

I am the Empire

5 years back exactly on this very day I walked into Cyber Towers office of Microsoft India for the...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 08/30/2009

How does the .NET Compact Memory allocator work

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts the .NET Compact Framework uses 5 separate heaps of which...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 05/31/2009

Memory leak via event handlers

One of our customers recently had some interesting out-of-memory issues which I thought I’d share....

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 05/05/2009

Finalizers and Thread local storage

Writing finalizers is generally tricky. In the msdn documentation for finalizers the following...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 04/29/2009

What post are you known for?

I was just listening to Scot Hanselman’s podcast where he interviews Joel. They talk about how most...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 04/20/2009

.NET Code Pitching

The word pitch can have many meanings, but in case of the code pitching it is used in the sense of...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 04/17/2009

Multiple calls to GC.ReRegisterForFinalize

What happens when there are multiple calls to GC.ReRegisterForFinalize for the same object? Consider...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 04/15/2009

.NET Compact Framework MemMaker

“Glen recently discovered that by keeping his application’s EXE empty and putting all the forms,...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 04/14/2009

Object Resurrection using GC.ReRegisterForFinalize

I have been thinking about writing this post for some time, but Easter weekend provided the right...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 04/13/2009

Technical Presentation Tip

I’m no Scot Hanselman, but even then I guess I can share at least one tip for delivering technical...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 04/07/2009

Floating point operations in .NET Compact Framework on WinCE+ARM

There has been a some confusion on how .NETCF handles floating point operations. The major reason...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 04/06/2009

NETCF: Total Bytes in Use After GC – Perf counter

At least one of our customers were a bit confused with the .NET Compact Framework performance...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 03/31/2009

How many heaps does the .NET Compact framework use

While discussing the memory architecture with an internal customer, he inquired about how many heaps...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 03/30/2009

.NET Compact Framework and ARM FPU

  One of our customers was porting an application on to .NETCF from native code and observed...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 03/27/2009

Random GC fun

A friend came by and asked “Dude, are you free”. I replied back cautiously “Why? Are you the Garbage...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 03/26/2009

Dangers of large object heap

Andrew Hunter has an interesting post on the issues with large object heap on the desktop CLR. Visit...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 03/24/2009

.NET Compact framework GC Quantum

In my post When does the .NET Compact Framework Garbage Collector run I mentioned that one of the...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 03/23/2009

Back To Basics: How does the GC find object references

This post is Part 9 in the series of posts on Garbage Collection (GC). Please see the index here....

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 03/03/2009

Back To Basics: Generational Garbage Collection

This post is Part 8 in the series of posts on Garbage Collection (GC). Please see the index here....

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 03/02/2009

Back To Basics: Handling overflow in mark stage

This post is Part 7 in the series of posts on Garbage Collection (GC). Please see the index here....

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 02/20/2009

Installing S60 development tools on Windows 7

My first attempt to install Carbide on Win 7 failed. So I thought I’d document the exact steps I...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 02/13/2009

Scott Guthrie’s visit to Microsoft India

I rarely blog about a photo but this is an exception. Scott Guthrie our Corporate Vice President for...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 02/12/2009

Back to Basics: Optimizing reference counting garbage collection

This post is Part 6 in the series of posts on Garbage Collection (GC). Please see the index here....

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 02/09/2009

Back To Basics: Copying Garbage Collection

This post is Part 5 in the series of posts on Garbage Collection (GC). Please see the index here. In...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 02/02/2009

Back To Basics: Mark and Sweep Garbage Collection

This post is Part 4 in the series of posts on Garbage Collection (GC). Please see the index here....

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 01/30/2009

Back To Basics: Reference Counting Garbage Collection

This is Part 3 in a series of post on GC, visit the list here. Reference counting (refcounting) GC...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 01/27/2009

Back to basic: Series on dynamic memory management

After becoming the .NET Compact Framework (.NETCF) dynamic memory management module owner I am...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 01/25/2009

Back To Basics: Memory allocation, a walk down the history

This post is Part 1 in the series of posts on Garbage Collection (GC). Please see the index here....

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 01/16/2009

When the spell checkers attack

Today Boing Boing had a post about the Cupertino effect in which spell-checkers erroneously change...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 12/15/2008

Is interlocked increment followed by comparison thread safe?

Sorry about the blog title, my imagination failed me :(. In our internal alias someone asked the...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 11/14/2008

C/C++ Compile Time Asserts

The Problem Run time asserts are fairly commonly used in C++. As the MSDN documentation for assert...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 10/27/2008

Taking my job more seriously

I generally take my work very seriously. However, the following from SICP was still my favorite...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 10/23/2008

Silverlight on Nokia S60 devices

In many of my blog posts (e.g.here and here) I refer to .NET Compact Framework and Symbian OS (S60)...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 10/22/2008

Who halted the code

Today a bed time story involving un-initialized variable access and a weird coincidence. Couple of...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 10/20/2008

Hex signatures

Frequently in code we need to add bit patterns or magic numbers. Since hex numbers have the...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 10/17/2008

Back To Basics: Finding your stack usage

Handling stack overflow is a critical requirement for most Virtual Machines. For .NET Compact...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 10/16/2008

Tail call optimization

I had posted about tail call and how .NET handles it before. However there was some email exchanges...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 09/26/2008

A* Pathfinding algorithm animation screen saver

I'm trying to learn WPF and IMO it is not a simple task. Previously whenever I upgraded my UI...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 09/17/2008

Designer for my path finding boards

I'm writing a small application (or rather a screen saver) that animates and demonstrates A* search...

Author: Abhinaba Basu [MSFT] Date: 09/11/2008

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