I’m going! My boss gave me the green light today. He only had one requirement. “You have to go to the pre-conference seminar for Windows Workflow Foundation as well!”. I told him to forget about it! No way! I’m staying at home ;)

For all of you who haven’t got around to buying the pass yet, today is your last chance to get the EarlyBird discount. Go to http://www.mseventseurope.com/Teched/06/Pre/defaultDev.aspx for details. You have 4 hours!

“Hi! There are no memory leaks in .Net! It has that great garbage collector everyone’s talking about! And the dispose pattern and all that”.

Not very likely that a person actually uttered this, but it’s a great start for a discussion. I’ll start mentioning some normal miss conceptions about GC, Dispose and that “stuff”:

• The garbage collector cleans up everything you keep laying around and you don’t need to worry about it.
• If you just do your cleanup in Dispose the GC will call dispose for you.
• If you really want to be sure, do your cleanup in the destructor and your home free.

Nice! Lets just do this and we can all go home… Or you can read on…:

• The garbage collector cleans up everything you don’t use anymore. That is all objects not referenced by your running program.
• If you do your cleanup in Dispose, YOU have to remember to call it! Not only that, if you use objects that have Dispose methods, you need to call them as well!
• You can do cleanup in the destructor, but it’s much more efficient to use the Dispose pattern. More on this later.

I think most of us know that the garbage collector only releases objects with no running references to it. What’s interesting though is that not everyone knows that you have to call Dispose on all objects that have a Dispose method! I can not emphasize this enough (even though I tried with bold text).

You have a gene in your body as developer to call Close methods (on file handles, data connection etc), but no one ever mentioned Dispose for you. Or you where told that the GC call Dispose for you, or something else that sounded good at the moment.

If you live in Bergen (Norway) and working with Microsoft .Net this is the place to be on Tuesday the 26th. And if you’re not you can always catch the same show in Trondheim (28th) and Oslo (October 9th). Go here to sign up.

NNUG (Norwegian .Net User Group) in Bergen is back for full this autumn. As a new member of the board I just like to invite everybody in Bergen to come and be updated on new technology, meet developers and architects from other companies, enjoy some free pizza and just have a good time. I must also mention that if you’re interested in contributing on future NNUG meetings, just drop us an email! You will find more information about NNUG on our updated website at www.nnug.no.

Finally I got the courage to create my own blog! I guess everybody has great plans for there blog when they first start up or maybe not… I have at least. Anyway I’m looking forward to start adding posts and I’m curious of how often I’ll manage to update it. I’ve planned for a purely technical blog. Since I’m an architect and a developer it will be a lot of stuff about programming and architecture. Hope you will enjoy it.