Presentations and Talks covering '.NET Internals'

12 Jul 2018 - 1747 words

I’m constantly surprised at just how popular resources related to ‘.NET Internals’ are, for instance take this tweet and the thread that followed:

If you like learning about '.NET Internals' here's a few talks/presentations I've watched that you might also like. First 'Writing High Performance Code in .NET' by Bart de Smet https://t.co/L5S9BsBlWe
— Matt Warren (@matthewwarren) July 9, 2018

All I’d done was put together a list of Presentations/Talks (based on the criteria below) and people really seemed to appreciate it!!

Criteria

To keep things focussed, the talks or presentations:

Must explain some aspect of the ‘internals’ of the .NET Runtime (CLR)
- i.e. something ‘under-the-hood’, the more ‘low-level’ the better!
- e.g. how the GC works, what the JIT does, how assemblies are structured, how to inspect what’s going on, etc
Be entertaining and worth watching!
- i.e. worth someone giving up 40-50 mins of their time for
- this is hard when you’re talking about low-level details, not all speakers manage it!
Needs to be a talk that I’ve watched myself and actually learnt something from
- i.e. I don’t just hope it’s good based on the speaker/topic
Doesn’t have to be unique, fine if it overlaps with another talk
- it often helps having two people cover the same idea, from different perspectives

If you want more general lists of talks and presentations see Awesome talks and Awesome .NET Performance

List of Talks

Here’s the complete list of talks, including a few bonus ones that weren’t in the tweet:

PerfView: The Ultimate .NET Performance Tool by Sasha Goldshtein
Writing High Performance Code in .NET by Bart De Smet
State of the .NET Performance by Adam Sitnik
Let’s talk about microbenchmarking by Andrey Akinshin
Safe Systems Programming in C# and .NET (summary) by Joe Duffy
FlingOS - Using C# for an OS by Ed Nutting
Maoni Stephens on .NET GC by Maoni Stephens
What’s new for performance in .NET Core 2.0 by Ben Adams
Open Source Hacking the CoreCLR by Geoff Norton
.NET Core & Cross Platform by Matt Ellis
.NET Core on Unix by Jan Vorlicek
Multithreading Deep Dive by Gael Fraiteur
Everything you need to know about .NET memory by Ben Emmett

I also added these 2 categories:

‘Channel 9’ Talks
- So many great talks featuring the Microsoft Engineers who work on the .NET runtime
Talks I plan to watch (but haven’t yet)

If I’ve missed any out, please let me know in the comments (or on twitter)

PerfView: The Ultimate .NET Performance Tool by Sasha Goldshtein (slides)

In fact, just watch all the talks/presentations that Sasha has done, they’re great!! For example Modern Garbage Collection in Theory and Practice and Making .NET Applications Faster

This talk is a great ‘how-to’ guide for PerfView, what it can do and how to use it (JIT stats, memory allocations, CPU profiling). For more on PerfView see this interview with it’s creator, Vance Morrison: Performance and PerfView.

Writing High Performance Code in .NET by Bart De Smet (he also has a some Pluralsight Courses on the same subject)

Features CLRMD, WinDBG, ETW Events and PerfView, plus some great ‘real world’ performance issues

State of the .NET Performance by Adam Sitnik (slides)

How to write high-perf code that plays nicely with the .NET GC, covering Span<T>, Memory<T> & ValueTask

Let’s talk about microbenchmarking by Andrey Akinshin (slides)

Primarily a look at how to benchmark .NET code, but along the way it demonstrates some of the internal behaviour of the JIT compiler (Andrey is the creator of BenchmarkDotNet)

Safe Systems Programming in C# and .NET (summary) by Joe Duffy (slides and blog)

Joe Duffy (worked on the Midori project) shows why C# is a good ‘System Programming’ language, including what low-level features it provides

FlingOS - Using C# for an OS by Ed Nutting (slides)

Shows what you need to do if you want to write and entire OS in C# (!!) The FlingOS project is worth checking out, it’s a great learning resource.

Maoni Stephens on .NET GC by Maoni Stephens who is the main (only?) .NET GC developer. In addition CLR 4.5 Server Background GC and .NET 4.5 in Practice: Bing are also worth a watch.

An in-depth Q&A on how the .NET GC works, why is does what it does and how to use it efficiently

What’s new for performance in .NET Core 2.0 by Ben Adams (slides)

Whilst it mostly focuses on performance, there is some great internal details on how the JIT generates code for ‘de-virtualisation’, ‘exception handling’ and ‘bounds checking’

Open Source Hacking the CoreCLR by Geoff Norton

Making .NET Core (the CoreCLR) work on OSX was mostly a ‘community contribution’, this talks is a ‘walk-through’ of what it took to make it happen

.NET Core & Cross Platform by Matt Ellis, one of the .NET Runtime Engineers (this one on how made .NET Core ‘Open Source’ is also worth a watch)

Discussion of the early work done to make CoreCLR ‘cross-platform’, including the build setup, ‘Platform Abstraction Layer’ (PAL) and OS differences that had to be accounted for

.NET Core on Unix by Jan Vorlicek a .NET Runtime Engineer (slides)

This talk discusses which parts of the CLR had to be changed to run on Unix, including exception handling, calling conventions, runtime suspension and the PAL

Multithreading Deep Dive by Gael Fraiteur (creator of PostSharp)

Takes a really in-depth look at the CLR memory-model and threading primitives

Everything you need to know about .NET memory by Ben Emmett (slides)

Explains how the .NET GC works using Lego! A very innovative and effective approach!!

Channel 9

The Channel 9 videos recorded by Microsoft deserve their own category, because there’s so much deep, technical information in them. This list is just a selection, including some of my favourites, there are many, many more available!!