XNA Diaries

While the slides and recordings from Gamefest are not yet available on the conference website, Rico Mariani has posted an article on his Performance Tidbits blog:

• Taming the CLR: How to Write Real-Time Managed Code

It's basically a copy of his slides and notes from his Gamefest talk of the same name. If you're concerned about performance and memory management issues in .NET you'll definately want to check it out.

With respect to XNA, remember that the desktop will use the full .NET runtime, whereas code running on the 360 will be using a variant of the Compact Framework. Rico talks about the how the garbage collector differs between these two models.

If you're looking for more information on this, some of Rico's earlier articles will be of interest

• Garbage Collector Basics and Performance Hints
• Two things to avoid for better memory usage
• When to call GC.Collect()

In addition, Steven Pratschner has a series of interesting articles that talk about memory management in the compact framework:

• An Overview of the .Net Compact Framework Garbage Collector
• The Design of the .Net Compact Framework CLR, Part I: Overview and Background
• The Design of the .Net Compact Framework CLR, Part II: JIT Compiler Design Considerations
• The Design of the .Net Compact Framework CLR, Part III: GC Heap Management

Enjoy!