I have started an interesting finance domain project based on newest technologies available (yeah, I love problems and to learn something new) on .NET platform. I will write more about as project will progress or maybe not because it might be a failure, you never know.

So I wanted to present a technology stack of this project:

Infrastructure:

• good old SVN (TFS 2010 would be an interesting option I was not be a one-man-band, also git or mercurial would be a nice, maybe even better option. But we have what we have.)
• Windows Server 2008 (R2)
  
• MS SQL Server 2008

IDE:

• Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 + Resharper 5.0 Beta
  

Technologies:

• .NET 4, C# 4, ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 2, jQuery, LINQ, PLINQ, Entity Framework, Parallel Library, F# (for calculations mostly), WCF (.NET 4), ...
  

Other:

• VS2010 Unit testing, VS2010 UML modelling, ...

A sneak peek HLA design (I have "abuse" - or not - component UML modelling):

I have yet to specify where will domain logic go (calculations). But this not affect HLA at all. As I write this I have done and overcome main design issues and "design coding". Now I will start to deal more with "content" or put it another way, house is build but rooms are empty.

And to be clear this is my personal project.

Usually the explanation of object reference or pointer goes it is an address which reference something. Well in high level overview we can simplify this to that explanation, but today we well look the difference between the object reference and pointer and we well see why reference in not nearly the same thing as pointer.

Address
First we will look what the address is. Every data cell in memory have address, as every person have home address, basically that simple it is. Address just happen to be a property of some specific memory implementation, we could just have other way to access it.

Reference
Reference is really simple programming concept. It just reference to something. You have NO control over it. You can just reference and dereference it.

Pointer
Pointer is an abstract programming concept, which points somewhere and supports arithmetic operations. Strictly looking, pointer "per se" have no information, it just know where can find it. And you have control over it (arithmetic operations). What is connection between pointer and address? Well Pointer is not an address. Pointer is just implemented with address, because it just perfectly suits to what Pointer needs. To summarize, Pointer can do everything what can Reference plus more.

To better understanding I have made some simple diagrams, how looks those two concept in .NET: