.NET Reference Guide

I learned the value of source control management (SCM) years ago when working on a multi-developer project. It only takes one or two incidents of somebody overwriting your major changes with a minor bug fix to convince you that there has to be a better way. Surprisingly, there are developers even today who discount the value of SCM and refuse to use it, despite its obvious benefits. This week I introduce the idea of Source Control Management, explain why you should use it and what kinds of things you should put under management. Next week we'll take a look at a few of the source control options available to .NET developers.

I mentioned Mario Hewardt's Advanced .NET Debugging a couple of weeks ago as the book for information about debugging .NET programs. One area of .NET that is notoriously difficult to debug using the normal Visual Studio tools is the managed heap. Visual Studio tools just don't give the kind of detailed information you need in order to find and fix problems that affect the managed heap. However, as he shows in his sample chapter, Advanced .NET Debugging: Managed Heap and Garbage Collection, it is possible to debug such problems with the native tools, and doing so is not terribly difficult. Even if you don't have a heap corruption problem, this article is worth reading just to get a better understanding of how the managed heap and garbage collection work.