My original posts on Finalization and Hosting had some hokey XXXXX markers in place of content, where that content hadn't already been disclosed in some form. Now that the Visual Studio 2005 Community Preview is available, I've gone back to those two posts and replaced the XXXXX markers with real text...

Hosting My prior three blogs were supposed to be on Hosting. Each time I got side tracked, first on Exceptions, then on Application Compatibility and finally on Finalization. I refuse to be side tracked this time… much. Also, I need to explain why it’s taken so long to get this...

Earlier this week, I wrote an internal email explaining how Finalization works in V1 / V1.1, and how it has been changed for Whidbey. There’s some information here that folks outside of Microsoft might be interested in. Costs Finalization is expensive. It has the following costs...

I’ve already written the much-delayed blog on Hosting, but I can’t post it yet because it mentions a couple of new Whidbey features, which weren’t present in the PDC bits. Obviously Microsoft doesn’t want to make product disclosures through my random blog articles. I’m...

The PDC has happened, which means two things.   I can post some of my (slightly self-censored) reactions to the show, and I can talk about what we ve disclosed about Whidbey and Longhorn more freely.   In this particular case, I had promised to talk about the deep changes we re making in...

I had hoped this article would be on changes to the next version of the CLR which allow it to be hosted inside SQL Server and other “challenging” environments. This is more generally interesting than you might think, because it creates an opportunity for other processes (i.e. your processes) to...

Usually I write blog articles on topics that people request via email or comments on other blogs. Well, nobody has ever asked me to write anything about shutdown. But then I look at all the problems that occur during process shutdown in the unmanaged world. These problems occur because many...

One of the recurring requests for a blog is related to TransparentProxy, RealProxy, Contexts, Interception, etc. As usual, I’m typing this where I don’t have access to our corporate network and the sources, so some details might be a little off. (When will my dentist provide free wireless to his...

I’ve been putting off writing this blog, not just because I’m on vacation in Maui and have far more tempting things to do. It’s because one of my blogs has already been used on Slashdot as evidence that Windows cannot scale and won’t support distributed transactions ( http://slashdot.org/comments...

An AppDomain is a light-weight process. Well, if you actually measure the costs associated with an AppDomain – especially the first one you create, which has some additional costs that are amortized over all subsequent ones – then “light-weight” deserves some explanation: A Win32 process is...

One of the suggestions for a blog entry was the managed memory model. This is timely, because we’ve just been revising our overall approach to this confusing topic. For the most part, I write about product decisions that have already been made and shipped. In this note, I’m talking about future directions...

The CLR’s type system includes primitive types like signed and unsigned integers of various sizes, booleans and floating point types. It also includes partial support for types like pointers and function pointers. And it contains some rather exotic beasts, like ArgIterators and TypedByRefs. (These...

In a comment to my last ramble, about asynchronous execution and pinning, someone asked for advice on using Windows impersonation in a managed application. Unfortunately, the managed platform currently has poor abstractions and infrastructure for controlling Windows identity, and indeed for most...

One thing we tried to do with the CLR and FX is provide a consistent asynchronous programming model. To briefly recap the model, an API called XXX may also offer an async alternative composed of BeginXXX and EndXXX methods. Even if the class that implements XXX doesn’t also offer BeginXXX and...

The CLR has two different techniques for implementing interfaces. These two techniques are exposed with distinct syntax in C#: interface I { void m(); } class C : I { public virtual void m() {} // implicit contract matching } class D : I { void I.m() {} // explicit contract matching...

The CLR type system supports both virtual and non-virtual instance methods. And IL can contain both CALLVIRT and CALL instructions. So it makes sense that IL generators would call virtual methods using CALLVIRT and call non-virtual instance methods with CALL. In fact, this is not necessarily the...

Managed strings are subject to ‘interning’. This is the process where the system notices that the same string is used in several places, so it can fold all the references to the same unique instance. Interning happens two ways in the CLR. 1) It happens when you explicitly call System...

It’s not possible to state exactly when a managed object will be collected. The garbage collector schedules itself based on various heuristics. Even if a garbage collection occurs, it may only collect the younger generations of the heap. And the JIT has some freedom to lengthen or shorten the lifetime...

What’s the difference between WaitHandle.WaitOne/WaitAny/WaitAll and just PInvoke’ing to WaitForSingleObject or WaitForMultipleObjects directly? Plenty. There are several reasons why we prefer you to use managed blocking through WaitHandle or similar primitives, rather than calling out to the...

Developers who are accustomed to the IDisposable pattern or to C#’s ‘using’ syntax sometimes ask why COM Interop doesn’t support IDisposable on every Runtime Callable Wrapper (RCW). That way, managed code could indicate that it is finished using the unmanaged COM resource. This would allow the ...

Every so often, someone tries to navigate from a managed System.Threading.Thread object to the corresponding ThreadId used by the operating system. System.Diagnostic.ProcessThread exposes the Windows notion of threads. In other words, the OS threads active in the OS process. System.Threading...

A common question is how to initialize code before it is called. In the unmanaged world, this is done with a DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH notification to your DllMain routine. Managed C++ can actually use this same technique. However, it has all the usual restrictions and problems related to the operating...

There are two kinds of threads executing inside managed code: the ones we start in managed code and the ones that wander into the CLR. The ones that started in managed code include all calls to Thread.Start(), the managed threadpool threads, and the Finalizer thread(s). For all the threads...

Developers often wonder why they are forced to derive from MarshalByRefObject or EnterpriseServices.ServicedComponent. It would be so much more convenient if they could add a CustomAttribute to their class or use a marker interface to declare that they want to be marshaled by reference or they want...

All managed objects other than those derived from ServicedComponent, when exposed to COM, behave as if they have aggregated the free threaded marshaler (FTM). In other words, they can be called on any thread without any cross-apartment marshaling. Although managed objects act as if they aggregate...