SUMMARY
This article provides a roadmap to learn and master garbage
collection in the Microsoft .NET Framework. To help you with learning a
Microsoft product or technology, roadmap articles provide links to useful
information, including online documentation, Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB)
articles, and white papers.
This article contains the following
sections:
Overview
Unlike COM, the common language runtime does not use reference
counting to govern object lifetime. Instead, the garbage collector traces
object references and identifies objects that can no longer be accessed by
running code. This simplifies component programming a great deal, because you
do not have to worry about circular references. If you use a group of objects
in which the objects contain references to each other, but none of these
objects are referenced directly or indirectly from stack or shared variables,
garbage collection automatically reclaims the memory.
Therefore,
garbage collection in .NET completely relieves the developer from the
responsibility of tracking memory usage and determining when to release memory.
However, it is important that you understand how garbage collection works. The
following links provide overview information about garbage collection in Visual
Studio .NET:
back to the topArchitecture
The following links provide architectural information about the
garbage collector in .NET:
back to the topKey concepts
The following links lead to documentation about key .NET garbage
collection concepts:
back to the topHow to articles
How To articles provide step-by-step instructions for performing
specific tasks. Run the following Microsoft Knowledge Base query to return How
To articles about Visual Studio .NET. After you have reached the query page,
you can narrow your search by providing additional search criteria:
back to the topTroubleshooting
If you experience problems, you can visit Microsoft newsgroups,
where you can share your experiences with your peers, or you can search the
Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) for KB articles about specific issues:
back to the top