Context If you just care about the code, then jump to the end In the CLR team and across other engineering teams in Microsoft we use build environments which are essentially command shells with a custom environment setup using bat and cmd scripts. These scripts setup various paths and environment variables...

I had very limited idea about how mixed mode programming on .NET works. In mixed mode the binary can have both native and managed code. They are generally programmed in a special variant of the C++ language called C++/CLI and the sources needs to be compiled with /CLR switch. For some recent work I am...

Long time back at the wake of the release of Windows Phone 7 (WP7) I posted about the Windows Phone 7 series programming model . I also published how .NET Compact framework powered the applications on WP7. Further simplifying the block diagram, we can think of the entire WP7 application system as follows...

A reader contacted me over this blog to inquire about the overhead of managed objects on the Windows Phone. which means that when you use an object of size X the runtime actually uses (X + dx) where dx is the overhead of CLR’s book keeping. dx is generally fixed and hence if x is small and there...

Fast Application Switch of FAS is kind of tricky for application developers to handle. There are a ton of documentation around how the developers need to handle the various FAS related events. I really liked the video http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/DevDays/DevDays-2011-Netherlands/Devdays059 which walks...

In my previous post “ Mark-Sweep collection and how does a Generational GC help ” I discussed how a generational Garbage Collector (GC) works and how it helps in reducing collection latencies which show up as long load times (startup as well as other load situations like game level load) and gameplay...

About a month back we announced that in the next release of Windows Phone 7 (codenamed Mango) we will ship a new garbage collector in the CLR. This garbage collector (GC) is a generational garbage collector. This post is a “ back to basics ” post where I’ll try to examine how a mark-sweep GC works and...

This is an announcement only post, do subscribe to this blog feed or on to http://twitter.com/abhinaba as I’d be making more detailed posts on these topics as we get close to handing over these bits to our developer customers. ARM processors support SIMD (Single Instructions Multiple Data) instructions...

If you are looking for information on the new Generational GC on Windows Phone Mango please visit http://blogs.msdn.com/b/abhinaba/archive/2011/06/14/wp7-mango-the-new-generational-gc.aspx Many moons ago I made a post on When does the .NET Compact Framework Garbage Collector run . Given that a lot...

In Building NETCF for Windows Phone 7 series we put in couple of features to enhance startup performance and ensure that the working set remains small. One of these features added is code/data sharing. Native applications have inherent sharing where multiple processes can share the same executable code...

If you are following the latest Windows Phone stories than you have surely heard about the .NET Compact Framework (NETCF) which is the core managed runtime used by the Windows Phone 7 programming model . This is an implementation of the .NET specification that works on devices and a disparate combination...

In the comments of my previous post Windows Phone 7 Series Programming Model and elsewhere (e.g. twitter, WP7 forum) there seems to be a lot of confusion around how NETCF 3.5 compares against the new WP7 programming model powered by NETCF 3.7. People are asking why some API got removed from 3.5, or is...

Today at MIX 2010 we announced Silverlight beta for Nokia S60 phones. Go download the beta from http://silverlight.net/getstarted/devices/symbian/ .  Currently the supported platform is S60 5th Edition phones and in particular the 5800 XpressMusic , N97 and N97 mini . It works in-browser and only...

Just sometime back I posted on the MIX 2010 announcements . One of the major aspects of the announcement was “The application model supported on Windows Phone 7 series will be managed only and will leverage Silverlight , XNA and the .NET Framework” That’s a mouthful and includes 3 framework names...

Someone contacted me over my blog about his managed application where the working set goes on increasing and ultimately leads to out of memory. In the email at one point he states that he is using .NET and hence there should surely be no leaks . I have also talked with other folks in the past where they...

I got a stress related issue reported in which the code tried allocating a 5MB array and do some processing on it but that failed with OOM (Out of Memory). It also stated that there was way more than 5 MB available on the device and surely it’s some bug in the Execution Engine. Here’s the code. try{...

One of our customers recently had some interesting out-of-memory issues which I thought I’d share. The short version The basic problem was that they had event sinks and sources. The event sinks were disposed correctly. However, in the dispose they missed removing the event sink from the event invoker...

Writing finalizers is generally tricky. In the msdn documentation for finalizers the following limitations are mentioned. The exact time when the finalizer executes during garbage collection is undefined The finalizers of two objects are not guaranteed to run in any specific order The thread on which...

The word pitch can have many meanings, but in case of the code pitching it is used in the sense of “to throw away”. The desktop CLR never throws away or pitches native code that it JITs. However, the .NET Compact Framework CLR supports code pitching due to the following reasons It is targeted towards...

What happens when there are multiple calls to GC.ReRegisterForFinalize for the same object? Consider the following C# code class MyClass { ~MyClass() { Console.WriteLine("~MyClass"); } } class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { MyClass mc = new MyClass(); GC.ReRegisterForFinalize...

I have been thinking about writing this post for some time, but Easter weekend provided the right context to do so. When I first encountered GC.ReRegisterForFinalize I was a bit baffled. The context help “ Requests that the system call the finalizer for the specified object for which System.GC.SuppressFinalize...

There has been a some confusion on how .NETCF handles floating point operations. The major reason for this confusion is due to the fact that the answer differs across the platforms NETCF supports (e.g. S60/Xbox/Zune/WinCE). I made a post on this topic which is partially incorrect. As I followed that...

At least one of our customers were a bit confused with the .NET Compact Framework performance counter “Total Bytes in Use After GC” which is described as “ The number of bytes of memory, native and managed, in use after the last garbage collection. ”. The description lead him to believe it is the total...

Andrew Hunter has an interesting post on the issues with large object heap on the desktop CLR. Visit http://www.simple-talk.com/dotnet/.net-framework/the-dangers-of-the-large-object-heap/ Side Note: .NET Compact Framework doesn’t support large object heap simply because it is primarily targeted towards...

This post is Part 9 in the series of posts on Garbage Collection (GC). Please see the index here. Most garbage collection algorithms needs to know all other objects referenced by a given object to correctly traverse object hierarchy. All of reference counting, mark-sweep and even coping collectors...