Patrick Dussud is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft who is the author of .NET’s garbage collector (GC) - the automatic memory management infrastructure that makes up most of what is managed in managed code execution. How does GC, work, generally? Why is it important? The GC inside of the CLR is of a specfic type - ephemeral, concurrent (the server version has always been concuurent and now with Background GC on the client in CLR 4, GC is concurrent on the client as well, but there are differences...).  Patrick takes us through the basics of GC up to the current state of the art in this outstanding conversation with one of the fathers of .NET. Of course, given the other expert in the room - programming language designer Erik Meijer, we have to talk about the impact that dynamic and functional languages have on the design of general purpose GCs as well as future directions of the CLR's GC, generally. What's Patrick working on these days?  Patrick will be presenting at PDC09 in the the Technical Leaders track. His talk, Future of GC, should not be missed. This conversation is a great introduction to what Patrick will be talking about and we highly recommend you watch this before you attend his session (or watch his session after the show shortly after the PDC ends - like last year, all sessions will be available on-demand...).  Enjoy.