In this article we will explore the Garbage Collection feature in the .Net framework and the activities required in applications to manage resources complementing the Garbage Collector.
Garbage Collection in Various Environments
One of the new features inherently available in the .Net framework is automatic garbage collection. The term garbage collection can be defined as management of the allocation and release of memory in an application. In C++, developers are responsible for allocating memory for objects created in the application and releasing the memory when the object is no longer needed. COM introduced a new model for memory management - Reference counting. Programmers were only responsible for incrementing the reference count when the object is referenced and decrementing the counter when the object goes out of scope. When the object's reference count reaches zero, the object is deleted and the memory gets freed. Both these schemes are dependent on the developer and result from time to time in memory leaks and application exceptions - conditions that occur at run-time and are not detectable at compilation.
