Points to remember about .Net


This article will give you some tips about .Net. This could be helpful for you especially when you prepare for interviews.

 

I am just trying to give the brief introduction of .NET framework here in following points:

 

  1. CLR
  2. IL
  3. JIT
  4. CTS
  5. Garbage collector
  6. AppDomains 

CLR

 

  • Central to the .net framework is its runtime execution environment, known as CLR.
  • Compilation occurs in two steps in .net
    1. Compilation of source code to IL
    2. IL to platform specific code by CLR (machine code)
  •    Code running under the control of CLR often termed as managed code.

IL

 

  • Working with .Net means compiling to IL
  • Any language that targets IL, should logically need to support the main characteristics of IL
  • By compiling to IL we get platform independence for .net
  • IL is always Just-In-Time compiled (JIT)

JIT

 

  • JIT compiler simply compiles each part of code as it is compiled
  • When the code has been compiled once, the resultant native executable is stored until the application ends.
  • JIT can optimize the code for the particular processor the code is running on.
  • The c# code will be compiled to IL before it is executed (csc compiles only to managed code).

CTS

 

  • CTS define the predefined data types that are available in IL, so that all languages that targets .Net Framework compiled codes.
  • Vb.net - Integer and C# - int both refers to Int32 due to CTS 

Garbage collector

 

  • GC works in non-deterministic pattern
  • GC is .Net's answer for memory management
  • GC takes care of memory leaks
  • Memory leak can be defined as existence of memory even if the application ends.
  • COM component maintains a reference count of how many clients are currently maintaining references to it. When the count comes to 0, the memory will be reclaimed.
  • All dynamically requested memory will be allocated on the heap.
  • The responsibility of GC is to clean up the unwanted heap memory.
  • CLR maintains its own heap for .Net applications to use.
  • Any objects that are not referred to be no longer used in your code will be removed.
  • It is not possible to use GC with Unmanaged code (like C++)

AppDomains

 

  • Appdomains are designed to ease the overhead involved while running applications that need to be isolated each other, but still wants to communicate with each other.
  • Earlier days, the choice is allowing the instances to share a process. The risk is, if a problem occurs in one running application, it will bring the whole website down.
  • When you start an application, it will run within the context of a process.
  • Windows isolates processes from each other through address locations.
  • 4GB of memory will be available for a process running on 32-bit systems.
  • It is impossible for one process to access memory allocated for another process.
  • This ensures that any badly behaved code will not affect others.
  • Each process has its own security token, which indicates to windows precisely what operations that process is permitted to do.
  • Note that, because processes cannot share memory, a complex marshalling process has to be used to copy data between processes. This signifies a big performance hit.
  • Appdomains are designed as a way that components are separated without making any performance issues, but still would be able to communicate each other without any hiccups.
  • The idea is splitting one process into different Appdomains.
  • The strong type safety of IL ensures that the memory is not handled inappropriately.
  • If a running application does need to communicate or share data with other application (across Appdomains) it must do so by calling .Net's remoting services.
  • Code that has been verified to check, that it cannot access data outside its Appdomain (other than through remoting mechanism) is said to be memory-type-safe. Such codes are allowed to run alongside in different Appdomains within the same process.


Similar Articles