Time for some book news update. CLR via C#, 3rd Edition seems to have been out for a little while now. The book was released in early Feb this year, and needless to say my copy is on it’s way. I can barely wait to dig in and chew on the goodies that one of the best technical authors and software professionals I respect has in store. The 2nd edition of the book was an absolute treat and this edition promises to be no less.
Here is a brief description of what’s new and updated from the 2nd edition.
Part I – CLR Basics
Chapter 1-The CLR’s Execution Model
Added about discussion about C#’s /optimize and /debug switches and how they relate to each other.
Chapter 2-Building, Packaging, Deploying, and Administering Applications and Types
Improved discussion about Win32 manifest information and version resource information.
Chapter 3-Shared Assemblies and Strongly Named Assemblies
Added discussion of TypeForwardedToAttribute and TypeForwardedFromAttribute.
Part II – Designing Types
Chapter 4-Type Fundamentals
No new topics.
Chapter 5-Primitive, Reference, and Value Types
Enhanced discussion of checked and unchecked code and added discussion of new BigInteger type. Also added discussion of C# 4.0’s dynamic primitive type.
Chapter 6-Type and Member Basics
No new topics.
Chapter 7-Constants and Fields
No new topics.
Chapter 8-Methods
Added discussion of extension methods and partial methods.
Chapter 9-Parameters
Added discussion of optional/named parameters and implicitly-typed local variables.
Chapter 10-Properties
Added discussion of automatically-implemented properties, properties and the Visual Studio debugger, object and collection initializers, anonymous types, the System.Tuple type and the ExpandoObject type.
Chapter 11-Events
Added discussion of events and thread-safety as well as showing a cool extension method to simplify the raising of an event.
Chapter 12-Generics
Added discussion of delegate and interface generic type argument variance.
Chapter 13-Interfaces
No new topics.
Part III – Essential Types
Chapter 14-Chars, Strings, and Working with Text
No new topics.
Chapter 15-Enums
Added coverage of new Enum and Type methods to access enumerated type instances.
Chapter 16-Arrays
Added new section on initializing array elements.
Chapter 17-Delegates
Added discussion of using generic delegates to avoid defining new delegate types. Also added discussion of lambda expressions.
Chapter 18-Attributes
No new topics.
Chapter 19-Nullable Value Types
Added discussion on performance.
Part IV – CLR Facilities
Chapter 20-Exception Handling and State Management
This chapter has been completely rewritten. It is now about exception handling and state management. It includes discussions of code contracts and constrained execution regions (CERs). It also includes a new section on trade-offs between writing productive code and reliable code.
Chapter 21-Automatic Memory Management
Added discussion of C#’s fixed state and how it works to pin objects in the heap. Rewrote the code for weak delegates so you can use them with any class that exposes an event (the class doesn’t have to support weak delegates itself). Added discussion on the new ConditionalWeakTable class, GC Collection modes, Full GC notifications, garbage collection modes and latency modes. I also include a new sample showing how your application can receive notifications whenever Generation 0 or 2 collections occur.
Chapter 22-CLR Hosting and AppDomains
Added discussion of side-by-side support allowing multiple CLRs to be loaded in a single process. Added section on the performance of using MarshalByRefObject-derived types. Substantially rewrote the section on cross-AppDomain communication. Added section on AppDomain Monitoring and first chance exception notifications. Updated the section on the AppDomainManager class.
Chapter 23-Assembly Loading and Reflection
Added section on how to deploy a single file with dependent assemblies embedded inside it. Added section comparing reflection invoke vs bind/invoke vs bind/create delegate/invoke vs C#’s dynamic type.
Chapter 24-Runtime Serialization
This is a whole new chapter that was not in the 2nd Edition.
Part V – Threading
Chapter 25-Threading Basics
Whole new chapter motivating why Windows supports threads, thread overhead, CPU trends, NUMA Architectures, the relationship between CLR threads and Windows threads, the Thread class, reasons to use threads, thread scheduling and priorities, foreground thread vs background threads.
Chapter 26-Performing Compute-Bound Asynchronous Operations
Whole new chapter explaining the CLR’s thread pool. This chapter covers all the new .NET 4.0 constructs including cooperative cancelation, Tasks, the aralle class, parallel language integrated query, timers, how the thread pool manages its threads, cache lines and false sharing.
Chapter 27-Performing I/O-Bound Asynchronous Operations
Whole new chapter explaining how Windows performs synchronous and asynchronous I/O operations. Then, I go into the CLR’s Asynchronous Programming Model, my AsyncEnumerator class, the APM and exceptions, Applications and their threading models, implementing a service asynchronously, the APM and Compute-bound operations, APM considerations, I/O request priorities, converting the APM to a Task, the event-based Asynchronous Pattern, programming model soup.
Chapter 28-Primitive Thread Synchronization Constructs
Whole new chapter discusses class libraries and thread safety, primitive user-mode, kernel-mode constructs, and data alignment.
Chapter 29-Hybrid Thread Synchronization Constructs
Whole new chapter discussion various hybrid constructs such as ManualResetEventSlim, SemaphoreSlim, CountdownEvent, Barrier, ReaderWriterLock(Slim), OneManyResourceLock, Monitor, 3 ways to solve the double-check locking technique, .NET 4.0’s Lazy and LazyInitializer classes, the condition variable pattern, .NET 4.0’s concurrent collection classes, the ReaderWriterGate and SyncGate classes.
