Question

I'm writing a soft real-time application in C#. Certain tasks, like responding to hardware requests coming in from a network, needs to be finished within a certain amount of milliseconds; however it is not 100% mission-critical to do so (i.e. we can tolerate it being on time most of the time, and the 1% is undesirable but not a failure), hence the "soft" part.

Now I realize that C# is a managed language, and managed languages aren't particularly suited for real-time applications. However, the speed in which we can get things done in C#, as well as the language features, like reflection and memory management, make the task of building this application much easier.

Are there any optimizations or design strategies one can take to reduce the amount of overhead and increase determinism? Ideally I would have the following goals

Delay the garbage collection until it is "safe"
Allow the garbage collector to work without interfering with real-time processes
Thread/process priorities for different tasks
Are there any ways to do these in C#, and are there any other things to look out for with regards to real-time when using C#?

The platform target for the application is .NET 4.0 Client Profile on Windows 7 64-bit, with. I've set it currently to Client profile but this was just the default option and wasn't chosen for any particular reason.