"Inside the Guts of CLR" - this was the topic of the MSDN session held on November 3rd Chennai, India. M Anand, MVP presented this Level 400 session and these days he is becoming the regular presenter for the MSDN sessions in Chennai. the session was quite informative and interesting. The crux of the presentation was CLR hosting and GC. A short listing of the things discussed:
- CLR Hosting - CLR hosting basics and advanced concepts like manually hosting CLR through COM. Actually it was interesting to learn that the infrastructure of the CLR is completely COM based.
- Garbage Collection - Basics of Memory handling, .NET GC algorithm, Object Finalization, Strong and Weak references etc. A demo on GC process using a simple string concatenating application was really informative. Infact I/we were amazed to see the GC differences when building strings with usual string concatenation and StringBuilder. This demo also helped to understand the best practice for string building.
- CLR enhancements in Whidbey - EnC and Generics.
Update: One of the attendees has posted the complete content of the seesion in the comments section here.
The FxCop team has released FxCop 1.312. Major features of this release:
- Simplification of report xml.
- New Fix Categories: Each message is marked to indicate if the suggested fix will constitute a breaking change for previously shipped code.
- User Interface Improvements: windowing behavior has been made more consistent
- Auto Update: Sign up to get notified when a new version of FxCop is available.
New rules in the areas of Design, Interoperability, Mobility, Naming, Performance, Portability, Security and Usage has been introduced. To read more on this release visit What's New in FxCop and download the tool here.
For people who ask what is FxCop, it is a code analysis tool that checks .NET managed code assemblies for conformance to the Microsoft .NET Framework Design Guidelines. It uses reflection, MSIL parsing, and callgraph analysis to inspect assemblies for more than 200 defects in the following areas:
- Library design
- Localization
- Naming conventions
- Performance
- Security
FxCop includes both GUI and command line versions of the tool, as well as an SDK to create custom rules.
MSDN has just released a new architecture and design guide for Smart Clients which provides information on several topics for those creating smart client applications. Issues addressed include data handling, connection state management, security, and threading.
The definition of "smart client" is dependent on requirements and implementation details but all share the following characteristics:
- Make Use of Local resources
- Make use of network resources
- Support occasionally connected users
- Provide intelligent installation and update
- Provide client device flexibility
To understand more on Smart Clients this article by David Hill would be helpful.
Access the Design Guide here...