Become a better .NET programmer

Chapter 1

Basic Concepts

General theoretical introduction to memory management, with almost no reference to .NET in particular.

Chapter 2

Low-Level Memory Management

Introduction to memory management on the hardware and operating system level.

Chapter 3

Memory Measurements

Solely dedicated to measurements and various tools (among which some are very often used later in the book).

Chapter 4

.NET Fundamentals

Describes relevant internals like .NET type system (including value type versus reference type), string interning or static data.

Chapter 5

Memory Partitioning

How memory is organized in .NET applications, introducing concept of Small and Large Object Heap, generations as well as segments.

Chapter 6

Memory Allocation

Dedicated solely to allocating memory. An important part of this chapter is description of various sources of allocations, in the context of avoiding them.

Chapters 7-10 🔥

Garbage Collection

Introduction to the description of the GC implementation in .NET, including a description of the steps performed, what triggers it, and choosing the generation to be collected.

Chapter 11

GC Flavors

Describing all available GC modes with comprehensive considerations which one to choose.

Chapter 12

Lifetime management

Describing all available GC modes with comprehensive considerations which one to choose.

Chapter 13

Miscellaneous Topics

Explains the topic of managed pointers and goes deeper into structs (including recently added ref structs).

Chapter 14

(Really) Advanced Techniques

Puts a lot of attention to types and techniques gaining more and more popularity recently, like Span and Memory types.

Chapter 15

GC Flavors

Describes various ways how we can control and monitor the GC from code, including GC class API, CLR Hosting or ClrMD library.