Every System.Threading.Tasks.Task instance goes through a lifecycle, and it only makes this journey once. To provide insight into where in that lifecycle a given Task is, the Task class provides an instance Status property. That property returns a value from the TaskStatus enumeration that reflects the current point in the lifecycle.&ld...
The IL Stub Diagnostic Tool enables real-time inspection of the contents of IL stubs. Developers now have a powerful tool to troubleshoot issues in interop marshalling, Introduction Jesse posted a great blog talking about the concept, history, and improvements of Intermediate Language (IL) stubs for CLR v4. He mentions The remainder of this...
Every so often we get asked questions about the CLR’s support for exception filters. Why do some languages support them and others do not? Is it a good idea to add them to my new language? When should I use a filter vs. catch/rethrow? Etc. I’ll try to answer some of these questions for you here, and while I won’t go into all of th...
The Parallel class in .NET 4 includes methods that implement three parallel constructs: parallelized for loops (Parallel.For), parallelized foreach loops (Parallel.ForEach), and parallelized statement regions (Parallel.Invoke). One of the interesting things about Parallel.Invoke is that, in some cases and at least in the current implementatio...
When the CLR needs to transition between managed and native code – usually because of P\Invoke or COM interop – we need to generate marshaling stubs (little chunks of code) to handle that specific call and transform the data from managed to native format and back again. . These stubs are little pieces of code that are usually ge...
If you’re the kind of early adopter who installs .NET 4 Beta 1 and also wants the latest and greatest operating system (Windows 7), please check out Scott Hanselman’s recent blog post http://www.hanselman.com/blog/VistaUsersUninstallVisualStudio2010Beta1BeforeUpgradingToWindows7.aspx While .NET 4 Beta 1 works well on both Vista ...
The new installment of the “CLR Inside Out” column in MSDN magazine is available on line. This month we have an article from Melitta Andersen on Code Contracts. It provides an overview of the feature, and includes some recommendations the Base Class Libraries team figured out as they added Code Contracts to the BCL...
In this post, we’ll investigate some ways that Parallel Extensions can be used to introduce parallelism and asynchrony to I/O scenarios. Here’s a simple scenario. I want to retrieve data from a number of web resources. static string[] Resources = new string[] { "http://www.microsoft.com", "http://www.msdn.com", ...
