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• WeakReferences are not freed in embedded OS

  - by Carsten König

  I've got a strange behavior here: I get a massive memory leak in production running a WPF application that runs on a DLOG-Terminal (Windows Embedded Standard SP1) that behaves perfectly fine if I run it localy on a normal desktop (Win7 prof.) After many unsucessful attempts to find any problem I put one of those directly beside my monitor, installed the ANTs MemoryProfiler and did one hour test run simulating user operations on both the terminal and my development PC. Result is, that due to some strange reasons the embedded system piles up a huge amount of WeakReference and EffectiveValueEntry[] Objects. Here are are some pictures: Development (PC): And the terminal: Just look at the class list... Has anyone seen something like this before and are there known solutions to this? Where can I get help? (PS the terminals where installed with images prepared for .net4)

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• Faster way to clone.

  - by AngryHacker

  I am trying to optimize a piece of code that clones an object: #region ICloneable public object Clone() { MemoryStream buffer = new MemoryStream(); BinaryFormatter formatter = new BinaryFormatter(); formatter.Serialize(buffer, this); // takes 3.2 seconds buffer.Position = 0; return formatter.Deserialize(buffer); // takes 2.1 seconds } #endregion Pretty standard stuff. The problem is that the object is pretty beefy and it takes 5.4 seconds (according ANTS Profiler - I am sure there is the profiler overhead, but still). Is there a better and faster way to clone?

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• How to profile a silverlight application?

  - by rudigrobler

  Is their any profilers that support Silverlight? I have tried ANTS (Version 3.1) without any success? Does version 4 support it? Any other products I can try? Updated since the release of Silverlight 4, it is now possible to do full profiling on SL applications... check out this article on the topic At PDC, I announced that Silverlight 4 came with the new CoreCLR capability of being profile-able by the VS2010 profilers: this means that for the first time, we give you the power to profile the managed and native code (user or platform) used by a Silverlight application. woohoo. kudos to the CLR team. Sidenote: From silverlight 1-3, one could only use things like xperf (see XPerf: A CPU Sampler for Silverlight) which is very powerful to see the layout/text/media/gfx/etc pipelines, but only gives the native callstack.) From SilverLite (PDC video, TechEd Iceland, VS2010, profiling, Silverlight 4)

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• WPF Datatemplate + ItemsControl each item uses > 1 MB Memory?

  - by Matt H.

  Does that sound right to anyone???? I have an ItemsControl that displays data from a custom object that implements iNotifyPropertyChanged. The DataTemplate consists of: Border 3 buttons 5 textboxes An ellipse A Bindable RichTextBox (custom class that inherits from RichTextBox... so I could make Document a dependency property (to support binding)) Several grids and stackpanels for layout It uses: Styles (stored in a resource dictionary higher up the tree) Styles affect: colors, thicknesses, and text properties: which are data-bound to a "settings" class that implements iNotifyPropertyChanged, so the user can change display settings That's it! So what gives? I've also noticed that when I empty and remove the ItemsControl, memory isn't freed. over 5000 instances of "CommandBindingCollection" and "WeakReference" are CREATED (using ANTS profiler). And huge number of EffectiveValueEntry objects are created too. So really, what gives!!! :-) Thanks for your insight! Management needs this project soon but in its current state, it's unreleasable.

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• The .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2010 Road Trip

  - by Laila

  Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell, the two .NET Rocks radio show hosts, have decided to set off to 15 cities in the US, between April 19th and May 7th, in their DotNetMobile (a 30 foot RV). What for you'll ask me? Well, to drive around the US, meet up with .NET developers, and show off the latest and greatest in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0! Each evening, they stop in a city and host a three hour event in front of a 100 to 300 crowd of developers, where Carl is showing off media features in Silverlight 4 and their road trip tracking application, whilst Richard is demo-ing the web performance testing features of VS2010 using his portable server rig. But before they take to the stage, they have a special guest brought in - a rock star from the Visual Studio world - whom they interview for an hour as a .NET Rock episode. So far, they've had - amongst others - Phil Haack, a Program Manager with the ASP.NET team working on ASP.NET MVC, Dan Fernandez, an Evangelism Manager in the Developer and Platform Evangelism team at Microsoft, and Beth Massi, Senior Program Manager on the Visual Studio Community Team at Microsoft. I love the fact that the audience gets a chance to participate, ask questions and have a great laugh, as you can hear in the first episode! Along the way, the .NET Rocks guys are giving away great prizes (including .NET Reflector Pro, ANTS Memory Profiler licenses, and "40" LCD TVs!). Even more out of the ordinary, at each stop on the road trip, one lucky attendee (who entered in the Ride Along competition) gets to jump in the RV with Carl and Richard and ride along with them to the next stop on the roadtrip. How cool is that! Richard told us: "Our first winner in Mountain View was Eric Ziko. I was looking for him to announce that he had won, when he found us and gave us a bottle of scotch he had brought just to say 'thanks for the great show'. We all had a toast from the bottle the next night when he headed back home." Cheeky! There's still space to a few of these events, so if you want to attend, register now, because it's first come first serve. We're grateful to Richard and Carl for giving us the opportunity to sponsor this major .NET event! A unique .NET adventure worth following for sure. Cheers, Laila

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• Inside Red Gate - Divisions

  - by Simon Cooper

  When I joined Red Gate back in 2007, there were around 80 people in the company. Now, around 3 years later, it's grown to more than 200. It's a constant battle against Dunbar's number; the maximum number of people you can keep track of in a social group, to try and maintain that 'small company' feel that attracted myself and so many others to apply in the first place. There are several strategies the company's developed over the years to try and mitigate the effects of Dunbar's number. One of the main ones has been divisionalisation. Divisions The first division, .NET, appeared around the same time that I started in 2007. This combined the development, sales, marketing and management of the .NET tools (then, ANTS Profiler v3) into a separate section of the office. The idea was to increase the cohesion and communication between the different people involved in the entire lifecycle of the tools; from initial product development, through to marketing, then to customer support, who would feed back to the development team. This was such a success that the other development teams were re-worked around this model in 2009. Nowadays there are 4 divisions - SQL Tools, DBA, .NET, and New Business. Along the way there have been various tweaks to the details - the sales teams have been merged into the divisions, marketing and product support have been (mostly) centralised - but the same basic model remains. So, how has this helped? As Red Gate has continued to grow over the years, divisionalisation has turned Red Gate from a monolithic software company into what one person described as a 'federation of small businesses'. Each division is free to structure itself as it sees fit, it's free to decide what to concentrate development work on, organise its own newsletters and webinars, decide its own release schedule. Each division is its own small business. In terms of numbers, the size of each division varies from 20 people (.NET) to 52 (SQL Tools); well below Dunbar's number. From a developer's perspective, this means organisational structure is very flat & wide - there's only 2 layers between myself and the CEOs (not that it matters much; everyone can go and have a chat to Neil or Simon, or anyone else inbetween, whenever they want. Provided you can catch them at their desk!). As Red Gate grows, and expands into new areas, new divisions will be created as needed, old ones merged or disbanded, but the division structure will help to maintain that small-company feel that keeps Red Gate working as it does.

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• The Missing Post

  - by Joe Mayo

  It’s somewhat of a mystery how the writing process can conjure up results that weren’t initially intended. Case in point is the fact that another post was planned to be in place of this one, but it never made the light of day.  This particular post started off as an introduction to a technology I had just learned, used, and wanted to share the experience with others.  The beginning was fun and demonstrated how easy it was to get started.  One of the things I’ve been pondering over time is that the Web is filled with introductions to new technologies and quick first looks, so I set out to add more depth, share lessons learned, and generally help you avoid the problems I encountered along the way; problems being a key theme of why you aren’t reading that post at this very minute.  Problems that curiously came from nowhere to thwart my good intentions. Success was sweet when using the tool for the prototypical demo scenario. The thing is, I intended the tool to accomplish a real task.  Having embarked on the path toward getting the job done, glitches began creeping into the process.  Realizing that this was all a bit new, I had patience and found a suitable work-around, but this was to be short lived. As in marching ants to a freshly laid out picnic, the problems kept coming until I had to get up and walk away.  Not to be outdone, sheer will and brute force manual intervention led to mission accomplishment.  Though I kept a positive outlook and was pleased at the final result, the process of using the tool had somewhat soured. Regardless of a less than stellar experience with the tool, I have a great deal of respect for the company that produced it and the people who built it. Perhaps I empathize for what they might feel after reading a post that details such deficiencies in their product.  Sure, if you’re in this business, you’ve got to have a thick skin; brush it off, fix the problem, and move on to greatness. But, today I feel like they’re people and are probably already aware of any issues I would seemingly reveal.  Anyone who builds a product or provides a service takes a lot of pride in what they do.  Sometimes they screw up and if their worth a dime, they make it up. I think that will happen in this case and there’s no reason why I should post information that has the potential to sound more negative than helpful.  While no one would ever notice or care either way, I’m posting something that won’t harm. Joe

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• Application Performance: The Best of the Web

  - by Michaela Murray

  Wisdom A deep understanding and realization […] resulting in the ability to apply perceptions, judgements and actions. It is also the comprehension of what is true coupled with optimum judgment as to action. - Wikipedia We’re writing a book for ASP.NET developers, and we want you to be a part of it. We know that there’s a huge amount of web developer wisdom that never gets shared, and we want to find those golden nuggets of knowledge and experience, and make sure everyone can learn from them. Right now, we want to find out about your top tips, hard-won lessons, and sage advice for avoiding, finding, and fixing application performance problems. If you work with .NET and SQL, even better – a lot of application performance relies on the interaction with the database, so we want to hear from you! “How Do You Want Me To Be Involved?” Right! Details! We want you, our most excellent readers, to email us with the Best Advice you would give to other developers for getting the best performance out of their applications. It doesn’t matter if your advice is for newbies or veterans, .NET or SQL – so long as it’s about application performance, we want to hear from you. (And if you think that there’s developer wisdom out there that “everyone knows”, a) I’m willing to bet you could find someone who doesn’t know about it, and b) it probably bears repeating anyway!) “I’m Interested. What Can You Do For Me?” Excellent question. For starters, there’s a chance to win a Microsoft Surface (the tablet, not the table-top). Once all the ASP.NET Wisdom has been collected, tallied, and labelled, it will then be weighed and measured by a team of expert judges (whose identities are still a closely-guarded secret).  The top tip in both SQL & .NET categories will each win their author their very own MS Surface. But that’s not all! We can also give you… immortality! More details? Ok. We’ll be collecting all of the tips sent in by our readers (and we can’t wait to learn from you all,) and with the help of our Simple-Talk editors, we will publish and distribute your combined and documented knowledge as a free, community-created, professionally typeset eBook. You will naturally be credited by name / pseudonym / twitter handle / GitHub username / StackOverflow profile / Whatever, as the clearly ingenious author of hot performance tips. The Not-Very-Fine Print Here’s the breakdown: We want to bring together the best application performance knowledge from ASP.NET developers. Closing date for submissions will be 9am GMT, December 4th. Submissions should be made by email – [email protected] Submissions will be judged by a panel of expert judges (who will be revealed soon). The top submission in both the SQL & .NET categories will each win a Microsoft Surface. ALL the tips which make it through the judging process will be polished by Simple-Talk editors, and turned into a professionally typeset eBook, which will be freely available, and promoted alongside the ANTS Performance Profiler tool. Anyone whose entry makes it into the book will be clearly and profusely credited in the method of their choice (or can remain anonymous.) The really REALLY short version Share what you know about ASP.NET application performance for a chance to win a Microsoft Surface, and then get your name credited in a slick eBook with top-notch production values. For more details, see above. We can’t wait to learn from you!

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• Profiling Startup Of VS2012 &ndash; JustTrace Profiler

  - by Alois Kraus

  JustTrace is made by Telerik which is mainly known for its collection of UI controls. The current version (2012.3.1127.0) does include a performance and memory profiler which does cost 614€ and is currently with a special offer for 306€ on sale. It does include one year of free upgrades. The uneven € numbers are calculated from the 799€ and 50% dicsount price. The UI is already in Metro style and simple to use. Multi process, attach, method recording filter are not supported. It looks like JustTrace is like Ants a Just My Code profiler. For stuff where you do not have the pdbs or you want to dig deeper into the BCL code you will not get far. After getting the profile data you get in the All Methods grid a plain list with hit count and own time. The method list for all methods is also suspiciously short which is a clear sign that you will not get far during the analysis of foreign code. But at least there is also a memory profiler included. For this I have to choose in the first window for Profiling Type “Memory Profiler” to check the memory consumption of VS.  There are some interesting number to see but I do really miss from YourKit the thread stack window. How am I supposed to get a clue when much memory is allocated and the CPU consumption is high in which places I should look? The Snapshot summary gives a rough overview which is ok for a first impression. Next is Assemblies? This gives you a list of all loaded assemblies. Not terribly useful.   The By Type view gives you exactly what it is supposed to do. You have to keep in mind that this list is filtered by the types you did check in the Assemblies list. The By Type instance list does only show types from assemblies which do not originate from Microsoft. By default mscorlib and System are not checked. That is the reason why for the first time my By Type window looked like The idea behind this feature is to show only your instances because you are ultimately responsible for the overall memory consumption. I am not sure if I do like this feature because by default it does hide too much. I do want to see at least how many strings and arrays are allocated. A simple namespace filter would also do it in my opinion. Now you can examine all string instances and look who in the object graph does keep a reference on them. That is nice but YourKit has the big plus that you can also look into the string contents.  I am also not sure how in the graph cycles are visualized and what will happen if you have thousands of objects referencing you. That's pretty much it about JustTrace. It can help the average developer to pinpoint performance and memory issues by just looking at his own code and instances. Showing them more will not help them because the sheer amount of information will overwhelm them. And you need to have a pretty good understanding how the GC and the CLR does work. When you have a performance issue at a customer machine it is sometimes very helpful to be able a bring a profiler onto the machine (no pdbs, …) and to get a full snapshot of all processes which are in the problematic use case involved. For these more advanced use cased JustTrace is certainly the wrong tool. Next: SpeedTrace

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• .NET "must-have" development tools

  - by nzpcmad

  James Avery wrote a classic article a while back entitled Ten Must-Have Tools Every Developer Should Download Now which is a companion to Visual Studio Add-Ins Every Developer Should Download Now and Scott Hanselman has an excellent list on his blog but if you were on a desert island and were only allowed three .NET development tools which ones would you pick? Update: Assuming you already have an IDE like Visual Studio ... Update (5) : Up to 08/01 : The current state of play: Reflector 13 Resharper 9 NUnit + TestDriven.Net 7 Refactor Pro 4 Process Explorer (other Sysinternals) 3 SnippetCompiler 3 CodeRush 3 MSDN Library 2 LinqPad 2 Cruisecontrol.net 2 VMWare 2 RhinoMocks 2 Fiddler 2 PowerShell 2 PowerCommands for VS 2008 1 Sandcastle 1 SQL Profiler 1 Redgate ANTS profiler 11 NCover 1 VisualSVN 1 Rubber Ducky 1 WinMerge 1 NAnt 1 ViEmu 1 AnkhSVN 1 dotTrace Profiler 1 BeyondCompare 1 DPack VS Plugin 1 WCF Trace Viewer (SDK) 1 xUnit.net 1 SourceGear DiffMerge 1 Ghostdoc 1 Expression Studio 1 XAML Pad 1 KaXaml 1 Blender for 3D modeling 1 Snoop a WPF tool 1 DiffMerge 1 DPack 1 NDepend 1 Kodos 1 WatiN 1 HTTPWatch Basic Edition 1 Paint.Net 1 Mole For VS 1 What I find particularly interesting about this is that "NUnit + TestDriven.Net " is right up there in third place which shows the growing emphasis on testing as an integral part of the development process rather than as an adjunct which is simply bolted on. And I'm somewhat perplexed that Codesmith didn't receive a single vote?

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• Memory leak when using Workflow 4.0 SqlWorkflowInstanceStore and PersistableIdleAction.Unload

  - by Rohland

  Hi, This particular problem is driving me nuts. I wonder if anyone has experienced a similar problem. If I load up a workflow then unload it and perform a memory snapshot then the result is predictable - my workflow is no longer in memory. However, if I load up a workflow and set the PersistableIdle action to PersistableIdleAction.Unload and let the workflow idle the workflow remains in memory even though the Unload action fires. I used ANTS Memory Profiler to debug this issue. This is the object retention graph outputted showing that an internal object is hanging onto my workflow instance. Can anyone else verify this problem? My code amounts to the following: Create SqlWorkflowInstanceStore and setup lock owner handle -- At this point I take a memory snapshot Create an instance of Workflow1 Set the PersistableIdle action Apply the instancestore to Workflow1 Setup action event handlers for Idle, Unload, UnhandledException etc. Persist the workflow instance Run the workflow instance Wait for instance to idle (caused by Delay activity) Ensure the Unload action is fired -- At this point I take a second memory snapshot From the above image, it is clear that the only object referencing Workflow1 is some internal event handlers result which I have no ability to dispose of. Any clues?

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• AntFarm anti-pattern -- strategies to avoid, antidotes to help heal from

  - by alchemical

  I'm working on a 10 page web site with a database back-end. There are 500+ objects in use, trying to implement the MVP pattern in ASP.Net. I'm tracing the code-execution from a single-page, my finger has been on F-11 in Visual Studio for about 40 minutes, there seems to be no end, possibly 1000+ method calls for one web page! If it was just 50 objects that would be one thing, however, code execution snakes through all these objects just like millions of ants frantically woring in their giant dirt mound house, riddled with object tunnels. Hence, a new anti-pattern is born : AntFarm. AntFarm is also known as "OO-Madnes", "OO-Fever", OO-ADD, or simply design-pattern junkie. This is not the first time I've seen this, nor my associates at other companies. It seems that this style is being actively propogated, or in any case is a misunderstanding of the numerous OO/DP gospels going around... I'd like to introduce an anti-pattern to the anti-pattern: GST or "Get Stuff Done" AKA "Get Sh** done" AKA GRD (GetRDone). This pattern focused on just what it says, getting stuff done, in a simple way. I may try to outline it more in a later post, or please share your ideas on this antidote pattern. Anyway, I'm in the midst of a great example of AntFarm anti-pattern as I write (as a bonus, there is no documentation or comments). Please share you thoughts on how this anti-pattern has become so prevelant, how we can avoid it, and how can one undo or deal with this pattern in a live system one must work with!

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• problem disposing class in Dictionary it is Still in the heap memory although using GC.Collect

  - by Bahgat Mashaly

  Hello i have a problem disposing class in Dictionary this is my code private Dictionary<string, MyProcessor> Processors = new Dictionary<string, MyProcessor>(); private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (!Processors.ContainsKey(textBox1.Text)) { Processors.Add(textBox1.Text, new MyProcessor()); } } private void button2_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { MyProcessor currnt_processor = Processors[textBox1.Text]; Processors.Remove(textBox2.Text); currnt_processor.Dispose(); currnt_processor = null; GC.Collect(); } public class MyProcessor: IDisposable { private bool isDisposed = false; string x = ""; public MyProcessor() { for (int i = 0; i < 20000; i++) { //this line only to increase the memory usage to know if the class is dispose or not x = x + "gggggggggggg"; } this.Dispose(); GC.SuppressFinalize(this); } public void Dispose() { this.Dispose(true); GC.SuppressFinalize(this); } public void Dispose(bool disposing) { if (!this.isDisposed) { isDisposed = true; this.Dispose(); } } ~MyProcessor() { Dispose(false); } } i use "ANTS Memory Profiler" to monitor heap memory the disposing work only when i remove all keys from dictionary how can i destroy the class from heap memory ? thanks in advance

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• Changing App.config at Runtime

  - by born to hula

  I'm writing a test winforms / C# / .NET 3.5 application for the system we're developing and we fell in the need to switch between .config files at runtime, but this is turning out to be a nightmare. Here's the scene: the Winforms application is aimed at testing a WebApp, divided into 5 subsystems. The test proccess works with messages being sent between the subsystems, and for this proccess to be sucessful each subsystem got to have its own .config file. For my Test Application I wrote 5 separate configuration files. I wish I was able to switch between these 5 files during runtime, but the problem is: I can programatically edit the application .config file inumerous times, but these changes will only take effect once. I've been searching a long time for a form to address this problem but I still wasn't sucessful. I know the problem definition may be a bit confusing but I would really appreciate it if someone helped me. Thanks in advance! --- UPDATE 01-06-10 --- There's something I didn't mention before. Originally, our system is a Web Application with WCF calls between each subsystem. For performance testing reasons (we're using ANTS 4), we had to create a local copy of the assemblies and reference them from the test project. It may sound a bit wrong, but we couldn't find a satisfying way to measure performance of a remote application. --- End Update --- Here's what I'm doing: public void UpdateAppSettings(string key, string value) { XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument(); xmlDoc.Load(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.SetupInformation.ConfigurationFile); foreach (XmlElement item in xmlDoc.DocumentElement) { foreach (XmlNode node in item.ChildNodes) { if (node.Name == key) { node.Attributes[0].Value = value; break; } } } xmlDoc.Save(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.SetupInformation.ConfigurationFile); System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.RefreshSection("section/subSection"); }

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• High Runtime for Dictionary.Add for a large amount of items

  - by aaginor

  Hi folks, I have a C#-Application that stores data from a TextFile in a Dictionary-Object. The amount of data to be stored can be rather large, so it takes a lot of time inserting the entries. With many items in the Dictionary it gets even worse, because of the resizing of internal array, that stores the data for the Dictionary. So I initialized the Dictionary with the amount of items that will be added, but this has no impact on speed. Here is my function: private Dictionary<IdPair, Edge> AddEdgesToExistingNodes(HashSet<NodeConnection> connections) { Dictionary<IdPair, Edge> resultSet = new Dictionary<IdPair, Edge>(connections.Count); foreach (NodeConnection con in connections) { ... resultSet.Add(nodeIdPair, newEdge); } return resultSet; } In my tests, I insert ~300k items. I checked the running time with ANTS Performance Profiler and found, that the Average time for resultSet.Add(...) doesn't change when I initialize the Dictionary with the needed size. It is the same as when I initialize the Dictionary with new Dictionary(); (about 0.256 ms on average for each Add). This is definitely caused by the amount of data in the Dictionary (ALTHOUGH I initialized it with the desired size). For the first 20k items, the average time for Add is 0.03 ms for each item. Any idea, how to make the add-operation faster? Thanks in advance, Frank

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• Iteration over a linq to sql query is very slow.

  - by devzero

  I have a view, AdvertView in my database, this view is a simple join between some tables (advert, customer, properties). Then I have a simple linq query to fetch all adverts for a customer: public IEnumerable<AdvertView> GetAdvertForCustomerID(int customerID) { var advertList = from advert in _dbContext.AdvertViews where advert.Customer_ID.Equals(customerID) select advert; return advertList; } I then wish to map this to modelItems for my MVC application: public List<AdvertModelItem> GetAdvertsByCustomer(int customerId) { List<AdvertModelItem> lstAdverts = new List<AdvertModelItem>(); List<AdvertView> adViews = _dataHandler.GetAdvertForCustomerID(customerId).ToList(); foreach(AdvertView adView in adViews) { lstAdverts.Add(_advertMapper.MapToModelClass(adView)); } return lstAdverts; } I was expecting to have some performance issues with the SQL, but the problem seems to be with the .ToList() function. I'm using ANTS performance profiler and it reports that the total runtime of the function is 1.400ms, and 850 of those is with the ToList(). So my question is, why does the tolist function take such a long time here?

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• How to detect .NET WPF memory leak or GC long run?

  - by Néstor Sánchez A.

  I have the next very strange situation and problem: .NET 4.0 application for diagram editing (WPF). Runs ok in my PC: 8GM RAM, 3.0GHz, i7 quad-core. While creating objects (mostly diagram nodes and connectors, plus all the undo/redo information) the TaskManager show, as expected, some memory usage "jumps" (up and down). These mem-usage "jumps" also remains executing AFTER user interaction ended. Maybe this is the GC cleaning/regorganizing memory? To see what is going on, I've used the Ants mem profiler, but somewhat it prevents those "jumps" to happen after user interaction. PROBLEM: It Freezes/Hangs after seconds or minutes of usage in some slow/weak laptos/netbooks of my beta testers (under 2GHz of speed and under 2GB of RAM). I was thinking of a memory leak, but... EDIT: Also, there is the case that the memory usage grows and grows until collapse (only in slow machines). In a Windows XP Mode machine (VM in Win 7) with only 512MB of RAM Assigned it works fine without mem-usage "jumps" after user interaction (no GC cleaning?!). So, I really have a big trouble because I cannot reproduce the error, only see these strange behaviour (mem jumps), and the tool supposed to show me what is happening is hiding the problem (like the "observer's paradox"). Any ideas on what's happening and how to solve it?

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• Some notes on Reflector 7

  - by CliveT

  Both Bart and I have blogged about some of the changes that we (and other members of the team) have made to .NET Reflector for version 7, including the new tabbed browsing model, the inclusion of Jason Haley's PowerCommands add-in and some improvements to decompilation such as handling iterator blocks. The intention of this blog post is to cover all of the main new features in one place, and to describe the three new editions of .NET Reflector 7. If you'd simply like to try out the latest version of the beta for yourself you can do so here. Three new editions .NET Reflector 7 will come in three new editions: .NET Reflector .NET Reflector VS .NET Reflector VSPro The first edition is just the standalone Windows application. The latter two editions include the Windows application, but also add the power of Reflector into Visual Studio so that you can save time switching tools and quickly get to the bottom of a debugging issue that involves third-party code. Let's take a look at some of the new features in each edition. Tabbed browsing .NET Reflector now has a tabbed browsing model, in which the individual tabs have independent histories. You can open a new tab to view the selected object by using CTRL+CLICK. I've found this really useful when I'm investigating a particular piece of code but then want to focus on some other methods that I find along the way. For version 7, we wanted to implement the basic idea of tabs to see whether it is something that users will find helpful. If it is something that enhances productivity, we will add more tab-based features in a future version. PowerCommands add-in We have also included Jason Haley's PowerCommands add-in as part of version 7. This add-in provides a number of useful commands, including support for opening .xap files and extracting the constituent assemblies, and a query editor that allows C# queries to be written and executed against the Reflector object model . All of the PowerCommands features can be turned on from the options menu. We will be really interested to see what people are finding useful for further integration into the main tool in the future. My personal favourite part of the PowerCommands add-in is the query editor. You can set up as many of your own queries as you like, but we provide 25 to get you started. These do useful things like listing all extension methods in a given assembly, and displaying other lower-level information, such as the number of times that a given method uses the box IL instruction. These queries can be extracted and then executed from the 'Run Query' context menu within the assembly explorer. Moreover, the queries can be loaded, modified, and saved using the built-in editor, allowing very specific user customization and sharing of queries. The PowerCommands add-in contains many other useful utilities. For example, you can open an item using an external application, work with enumeration bit flags, or generate assembly binding redirect files. You can see Bart's earlier post for a more complete list. .NET Reflector VS .NET Reflector VS adds a brand new Reflector object browser into Visual Studio to save you time opening .NET Reflector separately and browsing for an object. A 'Decompile and Explore' option is also added to the context menu of references in the Solution Explorer, so you don't need to leave Visual Studio to look through decompiled code. We've also added some simple navigation features to allow you to move through the decompiled code as quickly and easily as you can in .NET Reflector. When this is selected, the add-in decompiles the given assembly, Once the decompilation has finished, a clone of the Reflector assembly explorer can be used inside Visual Studio. When Reflector generates the source code, it records the location information. You can therefore navigate from the source file to other decompiled source using the 'Go To Definition' context menu item. This then takes you to the definition in another decompiled assembly. .NET Reflector VSPro .NET Reflector VSPro builds on the features in .NET Reflector VS to add the ability to debug any source code you decompile. When you decompile with .NET Reflector VSPro, a matching .pdb is generated, so you can use Visual Studio to debug the source code as if it were part of the project. You can now use all the standard debugging techniques that you are used to in the Visual Studio debugger, and step through decompiled code as if it were your own. Again, you can select assemblies for decompilation. They are then decompiled. And then you can debug as if they were one of your own source code files. The future of .NET Reflector As I have mentioned throughout this post, most of the new features in version 7 are exploratory steps and we will be watching feedback closely. Although we don't want to speculate now about any other new features or bugs that will or won't be fixed in the next few versions of .NET Reflector, Bart has mentioned in a previous post that there are lots of improvements we intend to make. We plan to do this with great care and without taking anything away from the simplicity of the core product. User experience is something that we pride ourselves on at Red Gate, and it is clear that Reflector is still a long way off our usual standards. We plan for the next few versions of Reflector to be worked on by some of our top usability specialists who have been involved with our other market-leading products such as the ANTS Profilers and SQL Compare. I re-iterate the need for the really great simple mode in .NET Reflector to remain intact regardless of any other improvements we are planning to make. I really hope that you enjoy using some of the new features in version 7 and that Reflector continues to be your favourite .NET development tool for a long time to come.

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• Profiling Startup Of VS2012 &ndash; YourKit Profiler

  - by Alois Kraus

  The YourKit (v7.0.5) profiler is interesting in terms of price (79€ single place license, 409€ + 1 year support and upgrades) and feature set. You do get a performance and memory profiler in one package for which you normally need also to pay extra from the other vendors. As an interesting side note the profiler UI is written in Java because they do also sell Java profilers with the same feature set. To get all methods of a VS startup you need first to configure it to include System* in the profiled methods and you need to configure * to measure wall clock time. By default it does record only CPU times which allows you to optimize CPU hungry operations. But you will never see a Thread.Sleep(10000) in the profiler blocking the UI in this mode. It can profile as all others processes started from within the profiler but it can also profile the next or all started processes. As usual it can profile in sampling and tracing mode. But since it is a memory profiler as well it does by default also record all object allocations > 1MB. With allocation recording enabled VS2012 did crash but without allocation recording there were no problems. The CPU tab contains the time line of the application and when you click in the graph you the call stacks of all threads at this time. This is really a nice feature. When you select a time region you the CPU Usage estimation for this time window. I have seen many applications consuming 100% CPU only because they did create garbage like crazy. For this is the Garbage Collection tab interesting in conjunction with a time range. This view is like the CPU table only that the CPU graph (green) is missing. All relevant information except for GCs/s is already visible in the CPU tab. Very handy to pinpoint excessive GC or CPU bound issues. The Threads tab does show the thread names and their lifetime. This is useful to see thread interactions or which thread is hottest in terms of CPU consumption. On the CPU tab the call tree does exist in a merged and thread specific view. When you click on a method you get below a list of all called methods. There you can sort for methods with a high own time which are worth optimizing. In the Method List you can select which scope you want to see. Back Traces are the methods which did call you. Callees ist the list of methods called directly or indirectly by your method as a flat list. This is not a call stack but still very useful to see which methods were slow so you can see the “root” cause quite quickly without the need to click trough long call stacks. The last view Merged Calles is a call stacked view of the previous view. This does help a lot to understand did call each method at run time. You would get the same view with a debugger for one call invocation but here you get the full statistics (invocation count) as well. Since YourKit is also a memory profiler you can directly see which objects you have on your managed heap and which objects do hold most of your precious memory. You can in in the Object Explorer view also examine the contents of your objects (strings or whatsoever) to get a better understanding which objects where potentially allocating this stuff.   YourKit is a very easy to use combined memory and performance profiler in one product. The unbeatable single license price makes it very attractive to straightly buy it. Although it is a Java UI it is very responsive and the memory consumption is considerably lower compared to dotTrace and ANTS profiler. What I do really like is to start the YourKit ui and then start the processes I want to profile as usual. There is no need to alter your own application code to be able to inject a profiler into your new started processes. For performance and memory profiling you can simply select the process you want to investigate from the list of started processes. That's the way I like to use profilers. Just get out of the way and let the application run without any special preparations.   Next: Telerik JustTrace

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• WPF TreeView Virtualization

  - by Carlo

  I'm trying to figure out this virtualization feature, I'm not sure if I'm understanding it wrong or what's going on, but I'm using the ANTS memory profiler to check the number of items in a virtualized TreeView, and it just keeps increasing. I have a TreeView with 1,001 items (1 root, 1000 sub-items), and I always get up to 1,001 TreeViewItems, 1,001 ToggleButtons and 1,001 TextBlocks. Isn't virtualization supposed to re-use the items? If so, why would I have 1,001 of each? Also, the CleanUpVirtualizedItem never fires. Let me know if I'm understanding this wrong and if you have resources on how to use this. I've searched over the internet but haven't found anything useful. EDIT: Even the memory used by the tree grows from aporx. 4mb to 12mb when I expand and scroll through all the items. Let me know thanks. This is my code. XAML: <Window x:Class="RadTreeViewExpandedProblem.Window1" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300"> <Grid> <TreeView x:Name="treeView" VirtualizingStackPanel.IsVirtualizing="True" VirtualizingStackPanel.CleanUpVirtualizedItem="TreeView_CleanUpVirtualizedItem"> <TreeView.ItemsPanel> <ItemsPanelTemplate> <VirtualizingStackPanel /> </ItemsPanelTemplate> </TreeView.ItemsPanel> </TreeView> </Grid> </Window> C#: public partial class Window1 : Window { public Window1() { InitializeComponent(); TreeViewItem rootItem = new TreeViewItem() { Header = "Item Level 0" }; for (int i = 0; i < 1000; i++) { TreeViewItem itemLevel1 = new TreeViewItem() { Header = "Item Level 1" }; itemLevel1.Items.Add(new TreeViewItem()); rootItem.Items.Add(itemLevel1); } treeView.Items.Add(rootItem); } private void TreeView_CleanUpVirtualizedItem(object sender, CleanUpVirtualizedItemEventArgs e) { } }

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• Should Application_End fire on an automatic App Pool Recycle?

  - by Laramie

  I have read this, this, this and this plus a dozen other posts/blogs. I have an ASP.Net app in shared hosting that is frequently recycling. We use NLog and have the following code in global.asax void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { NLog.Logger logger = NLog.LogManager.GetCurrentClassLogger(); logger.Debug("\r\n\r\nAPPLICATION STARTING\r\n\r\n"); } protected void Application_OnEnd(Object sender, EventArgs e) { NLog.Logger logger = NLog.LogManager.GetCurrentClassLogger(); logger.Debug("\r\n\r\nAPPLICATION_OnEnd\r\n\r\n"); } void Application_End(object sender, EventArgs e) { HttpRuntime runtime = (HttpRuntime)typeof(System.Web.HttpRuntime).InvokeMember("_theRuntime", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Static | BindingFlags.GetField, null, null, null); if (runtime == null) return; string shutDownMessage = (string)runtime.GetType().InvokeMember("_shutDownMessage", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.GetField, null, runtime, null); string shutDownStack = (string)runtime.GetType().InvokeMember("_shutDownStack", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.GetField, null, runtime, null); ApplicationShutdownReason shutdownReason = System.Web.Hosting.HostingEnvironment.ShutdownReason; NLog.Logger logger = NLog.LogManager.GetCurrentClassLogger(); logger.Debug(String.Format("\r\n\r\nAPPLICATION END\r\n\r\n_shutDownReason = {2}\r\n\r\n _shutDownMessage = {0}\r\n\r\n_shutDownStack = {1}\r\n\r\n", shutDownMessage, shutDownStack, shutdownReason)); } void Application_Error(object sender, EventArgs e) { NLog.Logger logger = NLog.LogManager.GetCurrentClassLogger(); logger.Debug("\r\n\r\nApplication_Error\r\n\r\n"); } Our log file is littered with "APPLICATION STARTING" entries, but neither Application_OnEnd, Application_End, nor Application_Error are ever fired during these spontaneous restarts. I know they are working because there are entries for touching the web.config or /bin files. We also ran a memory overload test and can trigger an OutOfMemoryException which is caught in Application_Error. We are trying to determine whether the virtual memory limit is causing the recycling. We have added GC.GetTotalMemory(false) throughout the code, but this is for all of .Net, not just our App´s pool, correct? We've also tried var oPerfCounter = new PerformanceCounter(); oPerfCounter.CategoryName = "Process"; oPerfCounter.CounterName = "Virtual Bytes"; oPerfCounter.InstanceName = "iisExpress"; logger.Debug("Virtual Bytes: " + oPerfCounter.RawValue + " bytes"); but don't have permission in shared hosting. I've monitored the app on a dev server with the same requests that caused the recycles in production with ANTS Memory Profiler attached and can't seem to find a culprit. We have also run it with a debugger attached in dev to check for uncaught exceptions in spawned threads that might cause the app to abort. My questions are these: How can I effectively monitor memory usage in shared hosting to tell how much my application is consuming prior to an application recycle? Why are the Application_[End/OnEnd/Error] handlers in global.asax not being called? How else can I determine what is causing these recycles? Thanks.

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• nhibernate configure and buildsessionfactory time

  - by davidsleeps

  Hi, I'm using Nhibernate as the OR/M tool for an asp.net application and the startup performance is really frustrating. Part of the problem is definitely me in my lack of understanding but I've tried a fair bit (understanding is definitely improving) and am still getting nowhere. Currently ANTS profiler has that the Configure() takes 13-18 seconds and the BuildSessionFActory() as taking about 5 seconds. From what i've read, these times might actually be pretty good, but they were generally talking about hundreds upon hundreds of mapped entities...this project only has 10. I've combined all the mapping files into a single hbm mapping file and this did improve things but only down to the times mentioned above... I guess, are there any "Traps for young players" that are regularly missed...obvious "I did this/have you enabled that/exclude file x/mark file y as z" etc... I'll try the serialize the configuration thing to avoid the Configure() stage, but I feel that part shouldn't be that long for that amount of entities and so would essentially be hiding a current problem... I will post source code or configuration if necessary, but I'm not sure what to put in really... thanks heaps! edit (more info) I'll also add that once this is completed, each page is extremely quick... configuration code- hibernate.cfg.xml <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration> <configSections> <section name="hibernate-configuration" type="NHibernate.Cfg.ConfigurationSectionHandler, NHibernate" /> </configSections> <hibernate-configuration xmlns="urn:nhibernate-configuration-2.2"> <session-factory> <property name="dialect">NHibernate.Dialect.MsSql2005Dialect</property> <property name="connection.provider">NHibernate.Connection.DriverConnectionProvider</property> <property name="connection.driver_class">NHibernate.Driver.SqlClientDriver</property> <property name="connection.connection_string_name">MyAppDEV</property> <property name="cache.provider_class">NHibernate.Caches.SysCache.SysCacheProvider, NHibernate.Caches.SysCache</property> <property name="cache.use_second_level_cache">true</property> <property name="show_sql">false</property> <property name="proxyfactory.factory_class">NHibernate.ByteCode.Castle.ProxyFactoryFactory, NHibernate.ByteCode.Castle</property> <property name="current_session_context_class">managed_web</property> <mapping assembly="MyApp.Domain"/> </session-factory> </hibernate-configuration> </configuration> My SessionManager class which is bound and unbound in a HttpModule for each request Imports NHibernate Imports NHibernate.Cfg Public Class SessionManager Private ReadOnly _sessionFactory As ISessionFactory Public Shared ReadOnly Property SessionFactory() As ISessionFactory Get Return Instance._sessionFactory End Get End Property Private Function GetSessionFactory() As ISessionFactory Return _sessionFactory End Function Public Shared ReadOnly Property Instance() As SessionManager Get Return NestedSessionManager.theSessionManager End Get End Property Public Shared Function OpenSession() As ISession Return Instance.GetSessionFactory().OpenSession() End Function Public Shared ReadOnly Property CurrentSession() As ISession Get Return Instance.GetSessionFactory().GetCurrentSession() End Get End Property Private Sub New() Dim configuration As Configuration = New Configuration().Configure() _sessionFactory = configuration.BuildSessionFactory() End Sub Private Class NestedSessionManager Friend Shared ReadOnly theSessionManager As New SessionManager() End Class End Class edit 2 (log4net results) will post bits that have a portion of time between them and will cut out the rest... 2010-03-30 23:29:40,898 [4] INFO NHibernate.Cfg.Environment [(null)] - Using reflection optimizer 2010-03-30 23:29:42,481 [4] DEBUG NHibernate.Cfg.Configuration [(null)] - dialect=NHibernate.Dialect.MsSql2005Dialect ... 2010-03-30 23:29:42,501 [4] INFO NHibernate.Cfg.Configuration [(null)] - Mapping resource: MyApp.Domain.Mappings.hbm.xml 2010-03-30 23:29:43,342 [4] INFO NHibernate.Dialect.Dialect [(null)] - Using dialect: NHibernate.Dialect.MsSql2005Dialect 2010-03-30 23:29:50,462 [4] INFO NHibernate.Cfg.XmlHbmBinding.Binder [(null)] - Mapping class: ... 2010-03-30 23:29:51,353 [4] DEBUG NHibernate.Connection.DriverConnectionProvider [(null)] - Obtaining IDbConnection from Driver 2010-03-30 23:29:53,136 [4] DEBUG NHibernate.Connection.ConnectionProvider [(null)] - Closing connection

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• Constant Memory Leak in SpeechSynthesizer

  - by DudeFX

  I have developed a project which I would like to release which uses c#, WPF and the System.Speech.Synthesizer object. The issue preventing the release of this project is that whenever SpeakAsync is called it leaves a memory leak that grows to the point of eventual failure. I believe I have cleaned up properly after using this object, but cannot find a cure. I have run the program through Ants Memory Profiler and it reports that WAVEHDR and WaveHeader is growing with each call. I have created a sample project to try to pinpoint the cause, but am still at a loss. Any help would be appreciated. The project uses VS2008 and is a c# WPF project that targets .NET 3.5 and Any CPU. You need to manually add a reference to System.Speech. Here is the Code: <Window x:Class="SpeechTest.Window1" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300"> <Grid> <StackPanel Orientation="Vertical"> <Button Content="Start Speaking" Click="Start_Click" Margin="10" /> <Button Content="Stop Speaking" Click="Stop_Click" Margin="10" /> <Button Content="Exit" Click="Exit_Click" Margin="10"/> </StackPanel> </Grid> // Start of code behind using System; using System.Windows; using System.Speech.Synthesis; namespace SpeechTest { public partial class Window1 : Window { // speak setting private bool speakingOn = false; private int curLine = 0; private string [] speakLines = { "I am wondering", "Why whenever Speech is called", "A memory leak occurs", "If you run this long enough", "It will eventually crash", "Any help would be appreciated" }; public Window1() { InitializeComponent(); } private void Start_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { speakingOn = true; SpeakLine(); } private void Stop_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { speakingOn = false; } private void Exit_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { App.Current.Shutdown(); } private void SpeakLine() { if (speakingOn) { // Create our speak object SpeechSynthesizer spk = new SpeechSynthesizer(); spk.SpeakCompleted += new EventHandler(spk_Completed); // Speak the line spk.SpeakAsync(speakLines[curLine]); } } public void spk_Completed(object sender, SpeakCompletedEventArgs e) { if (sender is SpeechSynthesizer) { // get access to our Speech object SpeechSynthesizer spk = (SpeechSynthesizer)sender; // Clean up after speaking (thinking the event handler is causing the memory leak) spk.SpeakCompleted -= new EventHandler(spk_Completed); // Dispose the speech object spk.Dispose(); // bump it curLine++; // check validity if (curLine = speakLines.Length) { // back to the beginning curLine = 0; } // Speak line SpeakLine(); } } } } I run this program on Windows 7 64 bit and it will run and eventually halt when attempting to create a new SpeechSynthesizer object. When run on Windows Vista 64 bit the memory will grow from a starting point of 34k to so far about 400k and growing. Can anyone see anything in the code that might be causing this, or is this an issue with the Speech object itself. Any help would be appreciated.

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• calling concurrently Graphics.Draw and new Bitmap from memory in thread take long time

  - by Abdul jalil

  Example1 public partial class Form1 : Form { public Form1() { InitializeComponent(); pro = new Thread(new ThreadStart(Producer)); con = new Thread(new ThreadStart(Consumer)); } private AutoResetEvent m_DataAvailableEvent = new AutoResetEvent(false); Queue<Bitmap> queue = new Queue<Bitmap>(); Thread pro; Thread con ; public void Producer() { MemoryStream[] ms = new MemoryStream[3]; for (int y = 0; y < 3; y++) { StreamReader reader = new StreamReader("image"+(y+1)+".JPG"); BinaryReader breader = new BinaryReader(reader.BaseStream); byte[] buffer=new byte[reader.BaseStream.Length]; breader.Read(buffer,0,buffer.Length); ms[y] = new MemoryStream(buffer); } while (true) { for (int x = 0; x < 3; x++) { Bitmap bmp = new Bitmap(ms[x]); queue.Enqueue(bmp); m_DataAvailableEvent.Set(); Thread.Sleep(6); } } } public void Consumer() { Graphics g= pictureBox1.CreateGraphics(); while (true) { m_DataAvailableEvent.WaitOne(); Bitmap bmp = queue.Dequeue(); if (bmp != null) { // Bitmap bmp = new Bitmap(ms); g.DrawImage(bmp,new Point(0,0)); bmp.Dispose(); } } } private void pictureBox1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { con.Start(); pro.Start(); } } when Creating bitmap and Drawing to picture box are in seperate thread then Bitmap bmp = new Bitmap(ms[x]) take 45.591 millisecond and g.DrawImage(bmp,new Point(0,0)) take 41.430 milisecond when i make bitmap from memoryStream and draw it to picture box in one thread then Bitmap bmp = new Bitmap(ms[x]) take 29.619 and g.DrawImage(bmp,new Point(0,0)) take 35.540 the code is for Example 2 is why it take more time to draw and bitmap take time in seperate thread and how to reduce the time when processing in seperate thread. i am using ANTS performance profiler 4.3 public Form1() { InitializeComponent(); pro = new Thread(new ThreadStart(Producer)); con = new Thread(new ThreadStart(Consumer)); } private AutoResetEvent m_DataAvailableEvent = new AutoResetEvent(false); Queue<MemoryStream> queue = new Queue<MemoryStream>(); Thread pro; Thread con ; public void Producer() { MemoryStream[] ms = new MemoryStream[3]; for (int y = 0; y < 3; y++) { StreamReader reader = new StreamReader("image"+(y+1)+".JPG"); BinaryReader breader = new BinaryReader(reader.BaseStream); byte[] buffer=new byte[reader.BaseStream.Length]; breader.Read(buffer,0,buffer.Length); ms[y] = new MemoryStream(buffer); } while (true) { for (int x = 0; x < 3; x++) { // Bitmap bmp = new Bitmap(ms[x]); queue.Enqueue(ms[x]); m_DataAvailableEvent.Set(); Thread.Sleep(6); } } } public void Consumer() { Graphics g= pictureBox1.CreateGraphics(); while (true) { m_DataAvailableEvent.WaitOne(); //Bitmap bmp = queue.Dequeue(); MemoryStream ms= queue.Dequeue(); if (ms != null) { Bitmap bmp = new Bitmap(ms); g.DrawImage(bmp,new Point(0,0)); bmp.Dispose(); } } } private void pictureBox1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { con.Start(); pro.Start(); }

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• The Red Gate and .NET Reflector Debacle

  - by Rick Strahl

  About a month ago Red Gate – the company who owns the NET Reflector tool most .NET devs use at one point or another – decided to change their business model for Reflector and take the product from free to a fully paid for license model. As a bit of history: .NET Reflector was originally created by Lutz Roeder as a free community tool to inspect .NET assemblies. Using Reflector you can examine the types in an assembly, drill into type signatures and quickly disassemble code to see how a particular method works.  In case you’ve been living under a rock and you’ve never looked at Reflector, here’s what it looks like drilled into an assembly from disk with some disassembled source code showing: Note that you get tons of information about each element in the tree, and almost all related types and members are clickable both in the list and source view so it’s extremely easy to navigate and follow the code flow even in this static assembly only view. For many year’s Lutz kept the the tool up to date and added more features gradually improving an already amazing tool and making it better. Then about two and a half years ago Red Gate bought the tool from Lutz. A lot of ruckus and noise ensued in the community back then about what would happen with the tool and… for the most part very little did. Other than the incessant update notices with prominent Red Gate promo on them life with Reflector went on. The product didn’t die and and it didn’t go commercial or to a charge model. When .NET 4.0 came out it still continued to work mostly because the .NET feature set doesn’t drastically change how types behave.  Then a month back Red Gate started making noise about a new Version Version 7 which would be commercial. No more free version - and a shit storm broke out in the community. Now normally I’m not one to be critical of companies trying to make money from a product, much less for a product that’s as incredibly useful as Reflector. There isn’t day in .NET development that goes by for me where I don’t fire up Reflector. Whether it’s for examining the innards of the .NET Framework, checking out third party code, or verifying some of my own code and resources. Even more so recently I’ve been doing a lot of Interop work with a non-.NET application that needs to access .NET components and Reflector has been immensely valuable to me (and my clients) if figuring out exact type signatures required to calling .NET components in assemblies. In short Reflector is an invaluable tool to me. Ok, so what’s the problem? Why all the fuss? Certainly the $39 Red Gate is trying to charge isn’t going to kill any developer. If there’s any tool in .NET that’s worth $39 it’s Reflector, right? Right, but that’s not the problem here. The problem is how Red Gate went about moving the product to commercial which borders on the downright bizarre. It’s almost as if somebody in management wrote a slogan: “How can we piss off the .NET community in the most painful way we can?” And that it seems Red Gate has a utterly succeeded. People are rabid, and for once I think that this outrage isn’t exactly misplaced. Take a look at the message thread that Red Gate dedicated from a link off the download page. Not only is Version 7 going to be a paid commercial tool, but the older versions of Reflector won’t be available any longer. Not only that but older versions that are already in use also will continually try to update themselves to the new paid version – which when installed will then expire unless registered properly. There have also been reports of Version 6 installs shutting themselves down and failing to work if the update is refused (I haven’t seen that myself so not sure if that’s true). In other words Red Gate is trying to make damn sure they’re getting your money if you attempt to use Reflector. There’s a lot of temptation there. Think about the millions of .NET developers out there and all of them possibly upgrading – that’s a nice chunk of change that Red Gate’s sitting on. Even with all the community backlash these guys are probably making some bank right now just because people need to get life to move on. Red Gate also put up a Feedback link on the download page – which not surprisingly is chock full with hate mail condemning the move. Oddly there’s not a single response to any of those messages by the Red Gate folks except when it concerns license questions for the full version. It puzzles me what that link serves for other yet than another complete example of failure to understand how to handle customer relations. There’s no doubt that that all of this has caused some serious outrage in the community. The sad part though is that this could have been handled so much less arrogantly and without pissing off the entire community and causing so much ill-will. People are pissed off and I have no doubt that this negative publicity will show up in the sales numbers for their other products. I certainly hope so. Stupidity ought to be painful! Why do Companies do boneheaded stuff like this? Red Gate’s original decision to buy Reflector was hotly debated but at that the time most of what would happen was mostly speculation. But I thought it was a smart move for any company that is in need of spreading its marketing message and corporate image as a vendor in the .NET space. Where else do you get to flash your corporate logo to hordes of .NET developers on a regular basis?  Exploiting that marketing with some goodwill of providing a free tool breeds positive feedback that hopefully has a good effect on the company’s visibility and the products it sells. Instead Red Gate seems to have taken exactly the opposite tack of corporate bullying to try to make a quick buck – and in the process ruined any community goodwill that might have come from providing a service community for free while still getting valuable marketing. What’s so puzzling about this boneheaded escapade is that the company doesn’t need to resort to underhanded tactics like what they are trying with Reflector 7. The tools the company makes are very good. I personally use SQL Compare, Sql Data Compare and ANTS Profiler on a regular basis and all of these tools are essential in my toolbox. They certainly work much better than the tools that are in the box with Visual Studio. Chances are that if Reflector 7 added useful features I would have been more than happy to shell out my $39 to upgrade when the time is right. It’s Expensive to give away stuff for Free At the same time, this episode shows some of the big problems that come with ‘free’ tools. A lot of organizations are realizing that giving stuff away for free is actually quite expensive and the pay back is often very intangible if any at all. Those that rely on donations or other voluntary compensation find that they amount contributed is absolutely miniscule as to not matter at all. Yet at the same time I bet most of those clamouring the loudest on that Red Gate Reflector feedback page that Reflector won’t be free anymore probably have NEVER made a donation to any open source project or free tool ever. The expectation of Free these days is just too great – which is a shame I think. There’s a lot to be said for paid software and having somebody to hold to responsible to because you gave them some money. There’s an incentive –> payback –> responsibility model that seems to be missing from free software (not all of it, but a lot of it). While there certainly are plenty of bad apples in paid software as well, money tends to be a good motivator for people to continue working and improving products. Reasons for giving away stuff are many but often it’s a naïve desire to share things when things are simple. At first it might be no problem to volunteer time and effort but as products mature the fun goes out of it, and as the reality of product maintenance kicks in developers want to get something back for the time and effort they’re putting in doing non-glamorous work. It’s then when products die or languish and this is painful for all to watch. For Red Gate however, I think there was always a pretty good payback from the Reflector acquisition in terms of marketing: Visibility and possible positioning of their products although they seemed to have mostly ignored that option. On the other hand they started this off pretty badly even 2 and a half years back when they aquired Reflector from Lutz with the same arrogant attitude that is evident in the latest episode. You really gotta wonder what folks are thinking in management – the sad part is from advance emails that were circulating, they were fully aware of the shit storm they were inciting with this and I suspect they are banking on the sheer numbers of .NET developers to still make them a tidy chunk of change from upgrades… Alternatives are coming For me personally the single license isn’t a problem, but I actually have a tool that I sell (an interop Web Service proxy generation tool) to customers and one of the things I recommend to use with has been Reflector to view assembly information and to find which Interop classes to instantiate from the non-.NET environment. It’s been nice to use Reflector for this with its small footprint and zero-configuration installation. But now with V7 becoming a paid tool that option is not going to be available anymore. Luckily it looks like the .NET community is jumping to it and trying to fill the void. Amidst the Red Gate outrage a new library called ILSpy has sprung up and providing at least some of the core functionality of Reflector with an open source library. It looks promising going forward and I suspect there will be a lot more support and interest to support this project now that Reflector has gone over to the ‘dark side’…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011

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