Platform Changes
Above and beyond the changes to the type system in Visual Basic .NET, there were also a number of changes required by the underlying structure of the .NET runtime environment itself.
Deterministic Finalization and Garbage Collection
The .NET platform was built from the ground up to be a garbage-collected system. That is to say, the .NET runtime environment tracks all references to objects allocated on the heap. Periodically, it checks whether some objects on the heap no longer have any references to them. If there are any such objects, they are garbage collected—that is, freed. This scheme for freeing heap allocations is different than the scheme employed by COM. COM employed a reference counting mechanism to track references ...
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