cbrumme's WebLog

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...

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...

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...

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...

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”...

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...

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...

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...

If there's a topic related to the CLR, feel free to drop me a line asking me to talk about it. I have a very time-consuming day job and a full life outside of work, so expect a long delay before I address your topic. Or I might feel I have nothing...

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...

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. ...

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. ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

We don't expose the managed size of objects because we want to reserve the ability to change the way we lay these things out. For example, on some systems we might align and pack differently. For this to happen, you need to specify tdAutoLayout for...

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...

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...

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 ...

By default, old blogs are truncated from this web site.  If you want to read old entries that have scrolled off, go to the CATEGORIES section at the right hand side of the web page.  Select CLR (rss) and you'll see the full list.

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...

It is not generally possible to turn off garbage collection. However, the garbage collector won’t run unless “provoked.” Garbage collection is triggered by: 1) Allocation 2) Explicit calls by the application to System.GC.Collect 3) Explicit...