A look back at 2017
31 Dec 2017I’ve now been blogging consistently for over 2 years (~2 times per/month) and I decided it was time for my first ‘retrospective’ post.
I’ve now been blogging consistently for over 2 years (~2 times per/month) and I decided it was time for my first ‘retrospective’ post.
A little over 3 years ago Microsoft announced that they were open sourcing large parts of the .NET framework and as Scott Hanselman said in his Connect 2016 keynote, the community has been contributing in a significant way:
The .NET runtime (CLR) has predominantly used a just-in-time (JIT) compiler to convert your executable into machine code (leaving aside ahead-of-time (AOT) scenarios for the time being), as the official Microsoft docs say:
If you grew up in the UK and went to school during the 1980’s or 1990’s there’s a good chance that this picture brings back fond memories:
Recently I was fortunate enough to be invited to the CORESTART 2.0 conference to give a talk on Microsoft & Open Source a ‘Brave New World’. It was a great conference, well organised by Tomáš Herceg and the teams from .NET College and Riganti and I had a great time.
Generics in C# are certainly very useful and I find it amazing that we almost didn’t get them:
Recently I was listening to the excellent DotNetRocks podcast and they had Steven Sanderson (of Knockout.js fame) talking about ‘WebAssembly and Blazor’.
Just over a year ago Google made all the open source code on GitHub available for querying within BigQuery and as if that wasn’t enough you can run a terabyte of queries each month for free!
It’s a fundamental part of .NET and can often happen without you knowing, but how does it actually work? What is the .NET Runtime doing to make boxing possible?
Have you ever wondered where and why the .NET Runtime (CLR) allocates memory? I don’t mean the ‘managed’ memory that your code allocates, e.g. via new MyClass(..) and the Garbage Collector (GC) then cleans up. I mean the memory that the CLR itself allocates, all the internal data structures that it needs to make is possible for your code to run.