Tuning the garbage collector to the specific context of the particular application can significantly improve the performance of both non-threaded and multi-threaded applications. In this post I discuss the gcConcurrent and gcServer settings which allow you to exercise some control how the Garbage Collector operates. Articles in This ...

Last time I talked about how to nest existing elements in your custom NAnt tasks.  Now that you've had a good look at that, and Jacob's custom task, there's only one other thing to cover in this subject: a new type.   Types end up looking a lot like a new task, but throwing this all together should be a lot of fun. Last time, I ...

If you follow the Atalasoft Blogs by whatever means, and you're reading this, it's quite possible you've also read Jacob's blog post about extending NAnt.  If you haven't already, go check it out since he's covered a huge amount of ground related to what I'm going to show in this and subsequent posts.  In fact, I'll assume you've ...

I have a new CodeProject article up which details how to make a Debugger Visualizer in the case where you need to custom serialize the object. The actual classes I build in the tutorial are only useful with our DotImage project line. However, the process of creating a Custom Serializer should be useful to any .NET ...

In the previous article I discussed a few of the benefits of stack allocation as well as a couple of C# keywords which help you to leverage those benefits. However, the one megabyte default stack size is too small for stack allocation to be used with a large dataset. Alternatively, in some threading situations one megabyte per thread/fiber can ...

Articles in This Series Part 1 – Basic Housekeeping Part 2 – Improving Performance Through Stack Allocation Part 3 – Increasing the Size of your Stack Part 4 – Choosing the Right Garbage Collector Settings Introduction In C#, when you create managed objects or arrays of value types, they are created on the Heap and you are passed ...

I went to my first Code Camp this weekend. I was a bit wary at first because it was hosted by Microsoft and I hate Corporate Kool-Aid. Thankfully, that was kept to a minimum and the focus was where it should be: on the code.   All of the panels I went to were worthwhile to some degree. However, three stood out to me as particularly ...

This is the first in a series of posts I will be writing about managing memory in .NET. Before I move on to more complex techniques, I thought it would be good to cover the basics. Articles in This Series Part 1 – Basic Housekeeping Part 2 – Improving Performance Through Stack Allocation Part 3 – Increasing the Size of the Stack Part 4 – ...

There are a great number of different ways to count the number of processors available to the .NET developer. In this post I will go over some of the more common methods and their pros and cons.   The Envirionment.ProcessorCount Way Code: Environment.ProcessorCount; Supported Platforms: Windows 98 Or Greater, .NET 2.0 or ...

One of the most often cited reasons to not use .NET is that it is initially compiled to an intermediary language (MSIL) and has to be recompiled every time you run it. In many high performance environments this wasted time is simply unacceptable. To combat this Microsoft released a tool with .NET 1.1 called NGen (Native Image Generator) which ...