101 Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET Applications

Application #67. Understand the Garbage Collector

This topic explores an aspect of the .NET Framework’s memory management system known as the Garbage Collector (GC). You’ll see how the GC reclaims memory from your application and how you can make your applications more memory efficient by creating GC-aware classes and by interacting directly with the GC.

New Concepts

Unlike some other runtime environments, memory management for managed code is nondeterministic. This means that although your code can indicate when it is finished using an object by setting a reference to Nothing, it can not explicitly remove that object from memory. The common language runtime (CLR) is responsible for determining when to actually remove the object from memory. ...