CLR 4

General purpose thread pools are more complicated to get right than you may think. In CLR 4 (the next version of the VM that powers .NET), the thread pool has made some significant advances in performance and support for concurrency and parallelism. Since V1, .NET programmers have been afforded the…

Orleans is a Microsoft Research (MSR) project and managed (.NET) software framework for building client + cloud applications. As outlined in the recently released paper on the topic: Orleans defines an actor-like model of isolated grains that communicate through asynchronous messages and…

Maoni Stephens is a software developer who spends her time implementing .NET's GC. In fact, she's been working on the GC since the early days of .NET. Andrew Pardoe is the GC PM. The last time we focused on GC on C9 was a conversation with GC creator Patrick Dussud. In that…

You recently learned about CLR 4's support for type equivalence in a conversation right here on C9 with Raja Krishnaswamy and Jesse Kaplan. The idea of type equivalence and its potential usefulness beyond simplifying and de-bloating COM interop that employs Interop Assemblies (CLR 4's No-PIA…

Surupa Biswas is a Program Manager on the CLR team working on NGen, CLR's Native Image Generator. The Native Image Generator (ngen.exe) creates native images, which are files containing compiled processor-specific machine code, and installs them into the native image cache on the local…

Principal Architect Raja Krishnaswamy, Program Manager Jesse Kaplan and team have created a new way to streamline and simplfiy PIA-based COM Interop: rather than including an entire PIA (Primary Interop Assembly) in your application to utilize the functionality of a few of its member…

ISV Architect Evangelist Bruce Kyle of Microsoft and MVP Stuart Celarier explore the new languages features in C#. It's a Whirlwind Tour of the important language features of C# 4. Stuart describes each major feature and why it is useful. But doesn't get into best practices nor suggested…

Senior SDE Shawn Farkas digs into the new security model in CLR 4. Gone are the days of head scratching complexity when it comes to reasoning about security in the managed world. The main goal for CLR 4 security was simplicity, in design and implementation for consumers (developers) of both…

CLR Architect Vance Morrison has been very busy working on the future of the CLR, especially as it relates to execution performance and the type system. Some of his latest work is present in the upcoming 4th version of the virtual machine that powers all things .NET, CLR 4, which ships with Visual…

CLR hosting has always been a hot topic. Consider the case of Windows Shell Extensions and the inability to load more than one CLR version per process being the dagger in the heart of the very idea of scalable managed shell extentions. With CLR 4, consuming applications will be able to host both a…