Internals of .NET Objects and Use of SOS

Well, now getting deeper into the facts, lets talk about how objects are created in .NET and how type system is laid out in memory for this post in my Internals Series.  As this is going to be very deep dive post, I would recommend to read this only if you want to kill your time to know the internal details of .NET runtime and also you have considerable working experience with the CLR types and type system.


Recently I have been talking with somebody regarding the actual difference between the C++ type system and managed C# type system. I fact the CLR Type system is different from the former as any object (not a value type) is in memory contains a baggage of information when laid out in memory. This makes CLR objects considerable different from traditional C++ programs.

Classification of Types

In .NET there are mainly two kind of Types.

1. Value Types (derived from System.ValueType)
2. Reference  Type (derived directly from System.Object)

Even though ValueTypes are internally inherited from System.Object in its core, but CLR treats them very differently.  Indeed from your own perception the Value Types are actually allocated in stacks (occationally) while reference types are allocated in Heaps. This is to reduce the additional contension of GC heaps for Heap allocation, GC cycles, occasional call to OS for additional memory needs etc. The object that is allocated in managed Heap is called Managed Object and the pointer that is allocated in stack to refer to the actual object in heap is called Object Reference (which is sometimes called as Managed Pointer). 

ValueType and ReferenceType : Under the Hood Part 2

Well, if you have read my previous post, you should be already clear how memory of ValueTypes and ReferenceTypes are allocated and De-allocated internally in terms of IL. Here in this post, I am going to cover some more concepts behind ValueTypes and ReferenceTypes and what exactly comprises of them.

In my previous post on the series, I have told you that any type that inherits from System.ValueTypes is stored in Stack while any type that is not inherited from System.ValueType is stored in Heap. Well, the statement is not correct totally.

Internals of loops (While, For and ForEach)

Practically speaking, a loop is the primary building block of a program. We use loop to repeat a set of actions for a certain interval. Now if you think of these intervals, it could be a traversal from one number (called as start index) to another number (called as end index). Very often or probably out of 10 such loop eight times you loop a collection such that you start from 0 and loop until you point to the end of the sequence.

In C# (and VB.NET) we use while, do-while, for and foreach loop to loop through a set of instructions. In this post I will try to demonstrate the basic loops for a while and later on take on a bit about foreach loop and its requirement and finally go deep into its internals.

If you want to see all my Internal Series, you are welcome to follow the link :
Internals to .NET

IObserver and IObservable - A New addition to BCL

With the introduction of new interfaces, it is time to get it on with discussion. With the current release of VS2010, there were two interfaces that were introduced viz, IObservable and IObserver. Here in the post, I am going to discuss about these interfaces and its connection to Push based approach on Reactive Framework.

IObserver and IObservable as a Dual to Enumerables

First, it should be noted, IObserver and IObservable is actually the mathematical dual of IEnumerable and IEnumerator. Based on iterator pattern, IEnumerable is actually a repository of elements that made up the objects. The IEnumerable holds all the objects and it uses IEnumerator to get each individual objects from the repository. The few methods in IEnumerator which the IEnumerable uses is MoveNext and Current. So for each iteration, the Enumerator calls MoveNext and assigns it to Current which is later on sent back to the external environment.

So if you consider the interface IEnumerable and IEnumerator it looks like :

public interface IEnumerator<out T> : IDisposable
{
          T Current { get; }
          bool MoveNext();
          void Reset();
 }

public interface IEnumerable<out T> : IEnumerable
{
     IEnumerator<T> GetEnumerator();
}

So the IEnumerator has MoveNext which is called every when we need to yield next element from the store. The MoveNext sets the Current item and sends it back to the Environment. So IEnumerable might be considered as Pull based approach and it is used for sequential retrieval of objects.

IObservable and IObserver introduced to BCL recently as stated is mathematical dual of IEnumerable and IEnumerator. Lets see the interfaces a bit :

public interface IObserver<in T>
{
    void OnCompleted();
    void OnError(Exception error);
    void OnNext(T value);
}

and for IObservable it is :

public interface IObservable<out T>
{
      IDisposable Subscribe(IObserver<T> observer);
}

Hence, if you see the difference between the two Interfaces, IEnuerator has Current and MoveNext. These methods are used to Pull objects from the repository. IObserver has OnNext which is used to Push objects to the repository. Again, if you look into IEnumerable, it uses GetEnumerator to pull back the object of IEnumerable, while IObservable has a Subscribe method which is used to push an Observer to the Observable. Hence you can easily say, Observable interfaces in BCL is a dual to Enumerables where the Former uses Push based approach and the later uses pull based approach.

Garbage Collection Notifications in .NET 4.0

Memory management is primary for any application. From the very beginning, we have used destructors,  or deleted the allocated memory whilst using the other programming languages like C or C++.  C# on the other hand being a proprietor of .NET framework provides us a new feature so that the programmer does  not have to bother about the memory deallocation and the framework does it automatically. The basic usage is :

1. Always leave local variable.
2. Set class variables, events etc to null. 

This leaves us with lots of queries. When does the garbage collection executes? How does it affect the current application? Can I invoke Garbage collection when my system / application is idle ?

These questions might come to any developer who has just came to .NET environment. As for me too, I was doing the application just blindly taking it account that this might be the basic usage of .NET applications, and there might be a hidden hand for me who works for me in background. Until after few days, I got an alternative to call the Garbage collection using

GC.Collect()

But according to the documentation, GC.Collect() is a request.It is not guaranteed that the Collection process will start after calling the method and the memory is reclaim So, there is still uncertainty whether actually the Garbage Collection will occur or not.

Why GC.Collect is discouraged ? 

GC.Collect actually forces the Garbage collection to invoke its collection process out of its regular cycle. It potentially decreases the performance of the application which calls it. As GC.Collect runs in the thread on which it is called, it starts and quickly finishes the call. In such phase of GC collection, actually the memory is not been reclaimed, rather it just produces a thorough scan on objects that are out of scope. The memory ultimately freed whenever Full Garbage collection takes place.
For reference you can read Scotts blog entry.

Whats new in .NET 4.0 (or .NET 3.5 SP1)
 Well, GC is changed a bit with the introduction of .NET 4.0, so that the programmer have better flexibility on how to use GC. One of such changes is the signature of GC.Collect()

Type Converters and Markup Extensions

TypeConverters and MarkupExtension are two concepts that are very popular when you work with XAML. When you first started learning XAML, the first thing that you might have noticed is Markup Extensions. So it is very essential to learn the use of Both the concepts like Markup Extension and Type Converters.

In this article, I have discussed how you might use Markup Extension and Type Converters to handle varied situation and also to create a rich client applications.

You can read the full article from :
Type Converters and Markup Extensions

I hope you will like it.

Thanks for reading.

Design Patterns in C#

As I am doing a lot of architecture stuffs, lets discuss the very basics of designing a good architecture. To begin with this, you must start with Design patterns.

What is Design Patterns ?

Design patterns may be said as a set of probable solutions for a particular problem which is tested to work best in certain situations. In other words, Design patterns, say you have found a problem. Certainly, with the evolution of software industry, most of the others might have faced the same problem once. Design pattern shows you the best possible way to solve the recurring problem.

Uses of Design Patterns

While creating an application, we think a lot on how the software will behave in the long run. It is very hard to predict how the architecture will work for the application when the actual application is built completely. There might issues which you cant predict and may come while implementing the software. Design patterns helps you to find tested proven design paradigm. Following design pattern will prevent major issues to come in future and also helps the other architects to easily understand your code.

History of Design Patterns

When the word design pattern comes into mind, the first thing that one may think is the classical book on Design Pattern "Gangs of Four" which was published by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides. In this book, it is first discussed capabilities and pitfalls of Object oriented programming, and later on it discusses about the classic Design Patterns on OOPS.

Types of Design Pattern

Design patterns can be divided into 3 categories.

1. Creational Patterns : These patterns deals mainly with creation of objects and classes.
2. Structural Patterns : These patterns deals with Class and Object Composition.
3. Behavioural Patterns : These mainly deals with Class - Object communication. That means they are concerned with the communication between class and objects.

In this article, I am going to discuss few examples of these patterns.

You can Read the entire article from
http://www.dotnetfunda.com/articles/article889-design-pattern-implementation-using-csharp-.aspx

or

Memory Management in .NET

In .NET memory is managed through the use of Managed Heaps. Generally in case of other languages, memory is managed through the Operating System directly. The program is allocated with some specific amount of memory for its use from the Raw memory allocated by the Operating system and then used up by the program. In case of .NET environment, the memory is managed through the CLR (Common Language Runtime) directly and hence we call .NET memory management as Managed Memory Management.

Allocation of Memory

Generally .NET is hosted using Host process, during debugging .NET creates a process using VSHost.exe which gives the programmer the basic debugging facilities of the IDE and also direct managed memory management of the CLR. After deploying your application, the CLR creates the process in the name of its executable and allocates memory directly through Managed Heaps.

When CLR is loaded, generally two managed heaps are allocated; one is for small objects and other for Large Objects. We generally call it as SOH (Small Object Heap) and LOH (Large Object Heap). Now when any process requests for memory, it transfers the request to CLR, it then assigns memory from these Managed Heaps based on their size. Generally, SOH is assigned for the memory request when size of the memory is less than 83 KBs( 85,000 bytes). If it is greater than this, it allocates memory from LOH. On more and more requests of memory .NET commits memory in smaller chunks.

Now let’s come to processes. Generally a process can invoke multiple threads, as multi-threading is supported in .NET directly. Now when a process creates a new thread, it creates its own stack, i.e. for the main thread .NET creates a new Stack which keeps track of all informations associated with that particular thread. It keeps informations regarding the current state of the thread, number of nested calls etc. But every thread is using the same Heap for memory. That means, Heaps are shared through all threads.

Upon request of memory from a thread say, .NET allocates its memory from the shared Heap and moves its pointer to the next address location. This is in contrast to all other programming languages like C++ in which memory is allocated in linked lists directly managed by the Operating system, and each time memory requests is made by a process, Operating system searches for the big enough block. Still .NET win32 application has the limitation of maximum 2GB memory allocation for a single process.

32 bit processors have 32 bits of address space for locating a single byte of data. This means each 2^32 unique address locations that each byte of data can locate to, means 4.2 billion unique addresses (4GB). This 4GB memory is evenly distributed into two parts, 2 GB for Kernel and 2 GB for application usage.

De- Allocation of Memory

De - allocation of memory is also different from normal Win32 applications..NET has a sophisticated mechanism to de-allocate memory called Garbage Collector. Garbage Collector creates a thread that runs throughout the runtime environment, which traces through the code running under .NET. .NET keeps track of all the accessible paths to the objects in the code through the Graph of objects it creates. The relationships between the Object and the process associated with that object are maintained through a Graph. When garbage collection is triggered it deems every object in the graph as garbage and traverses recursively to all the associated paths of the graph associated with the object looking for reachable objects. Every time the Garbage collector reaches an object, it marks the object as reachable. Now after finishing this task, garbage collector knows which objects are reachable and which aren’t. The unreachable objects are treated as Garbage to the garbage collector. Next, it releases all the unreachable objects and overwrites the reachable objects with the Unreachable ones during the garbage collection process. All unreachable objects are purged from the graph. Garbage collection is generally invoked when heap is getting exhausted or when application is exited or a process running under managed environment is killed.

Garbage collector generally doesn’t take an object as Garbage if it implements Finalize method. During the process of garbage collection, it first looks for the object finalization from metadata. If the object has implemented Finalize(), garbage collector doesn’t make this object as unreachable, but it is assigned to as Reachable and a reference of it is placed to the Finalization queue. Finalize is also handled by a separate thread called Finalizer thread which traces through the finalizer queue and calls the finalize of each of those objects and then marks for garbage collection. Thus, if an object is holding an expensive resource, the finalize should be used. But there is also a problem with this, if we use finalize method, the object may remain in memory for long even the object is unreachable. Also, Finalize method is called through a separate thread, so there is no way to invoke it manually when the object life cycle ends.

Because of this, .NET provides a more sophisticated implementation of memory management called Dispose, which could be invoked manually during object destruction. The only thing that we need is to write the code to release memory in the Dispose and call it manually and not in finalize as Finalize() delays the garbage collection process.

Cost of Finalize in your Program:

Now let us talk about the cost that you have to bear if you have implemented indeterministic approach of .NET and included Finalize in your class. To make it clear you must know how GC works in CLR:

Generation 0 object means the objects that we have declared after last garbage collection is invoked. 1st Generation objects means which is persisting for last 1 GC cycle. Likewise 2nd Generation objects and so on. Now GC does imposes 10 examinies for 0 to 1 generation objects before doing actual Garbage Collection. For 1 to 2 Generation objects it does 100 examinees before collecting.

Now lets think of Finalize, an object that implemented Finalize will remain 9 cycle more than it would actually collected. If it still not finalized, it would move to Geeration 2 and have to go through 100 examinees to be collected. Thus use of Finalize is generally very expensive in your program.

IDisposable implementation:

For Deterministic approach of resource deallocation, microsoft introduced IDisposable interface to clear up all the resources that may be expensive.

Let us take an example :

Protected virtual void Dispose(bool isDisposing)
{
if(IsDisposed) return;
if(isDisposing)
{
// Dispose all Managed Resources
}
IsDisposed = true;
GC.SuppressFinalize(this);
}

Now let us explain,
The first line indicates an if condition statement, Here I have checked if the object is already disposed or not. This is very essential, as in code one can call dispose a multiple times, we need to always check whether the object is already disposed or not. Then we did the disposing, and then made IsDisposed to true.
Now GC.SuppressFinalize will suppress the call to finalize if it is there. This is because, if the user already disposed the object and cleared up all the expensive resources using deterministic approach of deallocation, we dont need the GC to wait to call Indeterministic Finalize method during the Garbage Collection process.

For local objects, we can call dispose directly after using the object. We can also make use of Using block or try/catch block for automatic disposal of objects.

Note: In case of USING, you must remember it works only with the objects that Implements IDisposable. If you use object that dont have implemented IDisposable interface in using block, .NET will through error.