Showing archive results for 2010

Finalization is the crazy wildcard in garbage collection. It operates "behind the GC", running after the GC has declared an object dead. Think about it: Finalizers run on objects that have no active references. How can be a reference to an object that has no references? That's just crazy-talk! Finalizers are a Ouija board, permitting dead objec...

More than one customer has asked a question like this: I'm looking for a way to search for all instances of a particular type at runtime. My goal is to invoke a particular method on each of those instances. Note that I did not create these object myself or have any other access to them. Is this possible? Imagine what the world would be like if...

A customer asked the rather enigmatic question (with no context): Is there a way to get the reference count of an object in .Net? Thanks, Bob Smith Senior Developer Contoso The CLR does not maintain reference counts, so there is no reference count to "get". The garbage collector only cares about whether an object has zero references or at ...

Many people responded to Everybody thinks about garbage collection the wrong way by proposing variations on auto-disposal based on scope: "Any local variable that is IDisposable should dispose itself when it goes out of scope." "You should be able to attach an attribute to a class that says the destructor should be called imme...

As we saw last time, garbage collection is a method for simulating an infinite amount of memory in a finite amount of memory. This simulation is performed by reclaiming memory once the environment can determine that the program wouldn't notice that the memory was reclaimed. There are a variety of mechanism for determining this. In a basic tracing...

Welcome to CLR Week 2010. This year, CLR Week is going to be more philosophical than usual. When you ask somebody what garbage collection is, the answer you get is probably going to be something along the lines of "Garbage collection is when the operating environment automatically reclaims memory that is no longer being used by the program. It doe...

Locations in the shell known folder system can be marked as , which makes them immovable. Conversely, if a file system folder is not immovable, then it can be moved. This dichotomy appears simple and unworthy of discussion, except that customers sometimes have trouble incorporating this concept into their world view. I have some code that calls...

As part of a new phase in Microsoft's continuing recycling efforts, the recycling program got a new motto. The new motto was not announced with any fanfare. Rather, any recycling-related announcement had the new motto at the top as part of the letterhead. The new motto: It Takes You. I had trouble parsing this at first. To me, it sounded like th...

When a program crashes or hangs, you are given the opportunity to send an error report to Microsoft. This information is collected by the Windows Error Reporting team for analysis. Occasionally, somebody will ask, "How many failures need to be recorded before the bug is fixed? A thousand? Ten thousand? Ten million?" Each team at Microsoft takes ve...

I thought you meant to do that.