In this paper, we present an analysis of remote objects in Microsoft's Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure. The contribution of our work is threefold. First, we analyze the behavior of remote objects. We find that the basic behavior of these objects significantly differ from the ones of local objects, which have been thoroughly studied in the past. We also study the behavior of remote objects with respect to different activation modes (i.e. single-call, singleton, and client-activated). Second, based on those behavioral differences, we study the impacts of managing remote objects with a generational garbage collector that is designed essentially to manage local objects. We find that the garbage collection efficiency degrades significantly when the heap is interspersed with both local and remote objects. Third, we suggest various optimization techniques to improve the garbage collection efficiency in distributed objects environments.

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This paper reports our experience from teaching "Performance Analysis of Object-Oriented Systems" which was offered for the first time in the spring of 2004. The class was designed for juniors/seniors and graduate students majoring in Computer Science and Computer Engineering. The main focus of this course is on the implementations of class loading, Just-In-Time compiler, threading, and garbage collection in virtual machines supporting Object-Oriented languages such as Java and C#. We adopted Microsoft Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure (SSCLI) as the main experimental platform and the "Shared Source CLI Essentials" as one of the main accompanying textbooks. We find that the combination of SSCLI and the book provides a very effective means to deliver the course contents. In this paper, a complete documentation of the course design, the evaluation of students' work, and the instructor's reflection is presented.