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seteplia - Developer Support

Garbage collection and variable lifetime tracking

May 9, 2017 May 9, 2017 05/9/17
Sergey Tepliakov
Here is a seemingly simple question for you: Is it possible that the CLR will call a finalizer for an instance when an instance method is still running? In other words, is it possible in the following case to see ‘Finalizing instance.’ before ‘Finished doing something.’? internal class GcIsWeird { ~GcIsWeird() { ...

A common execution path optimization

February 21, 2017 Feb 21, 2017 02/21/17
Sergey Tepliakov
Today I want to talk about one interesting optimization pattern that you may face in framework code or in high-performance libraries. The idea is simple: suppose you have a commonly used method that has two execution paths – one is very common and simple, and the second one takes longer to execute, has more steps but happens not that ...

Dissecting the new() constraint in C#: a perfect example of a leaky abstraction

February 1, 2017 Feb 1, 2017 02/1/17
Sergey Tepliakov
Most likely you’ve heard about The Law of Leaky Abstractions coined by Joel Spolsky. Even if you never heard of it, you definitely faced it in your day-to-day job. The “law” is pretty simple: “All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky”. And this is 100% true. But sometimes even not that complicated abstractions can leak...

Understanding different GC modes with Concurrency Visualizer

January 5, 2017 Jan 5, 2017 01/5/17
Sergey Tepliakov
In this post I’m going to visualize what exactly happens during Garbage Collection (GC) and how different GC modes can significantly affect application performance. I assume that the reader is familiar with garbage collection basics. If this isn’t the case I encourage you to spend 15 minutes to fill this gap, for instance from the ...

Dissecting the ActionBlock: a Short Story About a Nasty Deadlock

December 20, 2016 Dec 20, 2016 12/20/16
Sergey Tepliakov
I think almost every project in the real world uses some form of producer-consumer queue. The idea behind this problem is very simple. Application needs to decouple consumers of some data from the logic that processes it. Consider, for instance, the thread pool from the CLR: application can schedule some work using ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem...

Dissecting the code: yet another programmer’s blog

December 20, 2016 Dec 20, 2016 12/20/16
Sergey Tepliakov
Hi everyone. My name is Sergey Tepliakov; I’m Senior Software Engineer at TSE(*) team at Microsoft. At my day-to-day job I’m working on a next-gen build engine with tons of very useful capabilities. But don’t worry, I’m not going to dig into this topic. At least for now:) Before joining Microsoft 2 years ago, I’ve been a Microsoft C...