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...

These days everyone is talking about being agile and test driven development (TDD). I wanted to share a success story of TDD that we employed for developing Generational Garbage Collector (GC) for Windows Phone Mango. The .NET runtime on Windows Phone 7 shipped with a mark-sweep-compact ; stop the world...

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...

  Consider the following code that I received: static void Foo() { TestClass t = new TestClass(); List<object>l = new List<object>(); l.Add(t); // Last use of l and t WeakReference w = new WeakReference(t); GC.Collect(); GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers(); Console.WriteLine...

Now that Windows Phone 7 is released all the gadget/tech blogs like TechCrunch, Engadget , Gixmodo are humming with reviews. Given that it’s a Version 1 product (ignore that 7 in the phone name) the reviews are great. Seeing all the buzz around gets me thinking about how I got involved in the project...

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...