Musings from the basement of a very tall building

Posted By Robin Freeman |  last update 15-Aug 2010

In the early naughties a terrible pestilence stalked microsoft application server land.  It wasn't if, but when, a memory leak would take your server down.  Lets be clear; a client or workstation machine sits on its hands most of the time and waits for its user to peck at its keyboard or move its mouse.  A server shouldn't have a user, it sits on its hands waiting for a request for information (from a workstation) via its network.  It will then start up some application that ends up sending that information.

A server might have a hundred applications that each get used a hundred times a day. This sounds like a lot of work, but the applications may need to run for microseconds only.  The important point is that when they finish they return any memory (and other resources) they use back to the operating system.  If they do not, and at the time we are considering, each application instance kept 20-40kB of memory for a variety of reasons; the server runs out of memory and crashes.  No I never did find the memory leak in my web applications, and yes I did just routinely restart the server every 4 weeks to overcome this problem.

Aware of this, microsoft revised its application development tools for the Visual Studio 2003 release.  Working in a fundamentally different ways to anything that had preceeded, the most important point was that the code produced was managed as it ran. Only those parts required were run and they were destroyed after completion.  The memory leak was gone, all hail the .net framework upon which this rests.

If you are going to do a microsoft development today, you are going to use .net framework managed code, google visual studio express for a free version.  This comes with a number of languages.  Choice is stressful, so you are going to use C Sharp (C#).  Yes I know, I started out with Basic to, but it is a dead end language, and the visual studio version isn't anything you will recognise.  C# was developed for managed code and if you become familiar with it you will find you can do C, C++, Java, Javascript, etc. to. 

Web applications are one of the application types within visual studio, and I will look at them next time.  However to understand these you will also need a smattering of hypertext (HTML), its general elements, DIV and the FORM elements.  Ignore anything on CSS, Javascript, Ajax; you have enough on your plate with C# and HTML especially if you are starting out.  Good luck.