Book Image

High-Performance Programming in C# and .NET

By : Jason Alls
Book Image

High-Performance Programming in C# and .NET

By: Jason Alls

Overview of this book

Writing high-performance code while building an application is crucial, and over the years, Microsoft has focused on delivering various performance-related improvements within the .NET ecosystem. This book will help you understand the aspects involved in designing responsive, resilient, and high-performance applications with the new version of C# and .NET. You will start by understanding the foundation of high-performance code and the latest performance-related improvements in C# 10.0 and .NET 6. Next, you’ll learn how to use tracing and diagnostics to track down performance issues and the cause of memory leaks. The chapters that follow then show you how to enhance the performance of your networked applications and various ways to improve directory tasks, file tasks, and more. Later, you’ll go on to improve data querying performance and write responsive user interfaces. You’ll also discover how you can use cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure to build scalable distributed solutions. Finally, you’ll explore various ways to process code synchronously, asynchronously, and in parallel to reduce the time it takes to process a series of tasks. By the end of this C# programming book, you’ll have the confidence you need to build highly resilient, high-performance applications that meet your customer's demands.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1: High-Performance Code Foundation
7
Part 2: Writing High-Performance Code
16
Part 3: Threading and Concurrency

Understanding long and short weak references

In the .NET runtime, there are two types of references: long weak references and short weak references. These are described in more detail here:

  • Long weak reference: When the Finalize() method has been called on an object, a long weak reference is retained in memory. You specify true in the WeakReference constructor to define a long reference. A long weak reference can be recreated, although its state can be unpredictable. A short weak reference will be applied when an object’s type does not have a Finalize() method. The weak reference will only remain until its target is collected sometime after the finalizer is run. You will need to cast the target property of a WeakReference constructor to the type of an object if you want to create a strong weak reference that will be reused. When the object is collected, the Target property will be null. If it is not null, then you can continue to use the object because the application...