MSDN Magazine - April 2008 - (Page 22)

Guerrilla .NET May 5th - Boston Guerrilla .NET: The Essentials April 7th - Los Angeles Call 800.699.1932 to register today! or visit www.develop.com New Hands-on .NET 3.0/3.5 Training What’s New in .NET 3.0/3.5 May 19th- Los Angeles Windows Communication Foundation w/ 3.5 content April 14th - Los Angeles May 5th - Bellevue, WA May 19th - Boston Windows Presentation Foundation w/ 3.5 content April 14th - Boston May 19th - New York June 9th - Los Angeles Windows WorkFlow Foundation April 28th - Los Angeles NEW COURSES Code Smarter w/Design Patterns-Apr 7th in LA Silverlight 2.0-Apr 23rd in LA On-Site Training For groups of students, DevelopMentor’s On-Site course delivery may offer the most cost-effective solution – at your location, at the time you need it. OnSites also offer the ability to customize a course to your group’s needs, including course content, labs that run on your programming platform and lab exercises tailored to your business or project. Call us today to discuss your training needs! US -800.699.1932 UK -(0) 8000.562.265 Europe-(0)01242.525.108 22 msdnmagazine CLR Inside Out The point that I want to stress is this concept of validation. If you can’t explain your data, you should not use it for making design decisions. If you have unusual data, ideally you should collect more data, debug the benchmarks, or collaborate with others who have more expertise until you can explain your data. You should be highly suspicious of unexplainable data, and should not use it in making any important decisions. This discussion is about the basics of writing high-performance applications. Like any other attribute of software, good performance needs to be designed into the product from the beginning. To do this, you need measurements that quantify the tradeoffs of making various design decisions. This means doing performance experiments. MeasureIt makes it easy to generate good-quality microbenchmarks quickly, and as such it should become an indispensable part of your design process. MeasureIt is also useful out of the box because it comes with a set of benchmarks that cover most of the primitive operations in the .NET Framework. You can also easily add your own benchmarks for the part of the .NET Framework that most interests you. With this data you can form a model of application costs and thus make reasonable (rough) guesses about the performance of design alternatives even before you have written application code. There is a lot more to say about the performance of applications in .NET. There are potential pitfalls associated with building microbenchmarks, so please do read the MeasureIt users guide before writing any. I have also deferred discussion about situations where disk I/O, memory, or lock contention is the important bottleneck. I have not even discussed how to use various profiling tools to validate and monitor the performance health of your application after it has been designed. There is a lot to know, and the sheer volume of information often discourages developers from doing any such testing at all. However, since most performance is lost in the design of an application, if you do nothing else, you should think about performance at this initial stage. I hope this column will encourage you to make performance an explicit part of the design on your next .NET software project. Code download available at msdn2.microsoft.com/magazine/cc135911. Send your questions and comments to clrinout@microsoft.com. Vance Morrison is the Compiler Architect for the CLR team at Microsoft, where he has been involved in the design of .NET since its inception. He drove the design for the .NET Intermediate Language (IL) and was lead for the just-in-time (JIT) compiler team. http://www.develop.com http://www.develop.com http://msdn2.microsoft.com/magazine/cc135911

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of MSDN Magazine - April 2008

MSDN Magazine - April 2008 Contents Toolbox CLR Inside Out Basic Instincts Cutting Edge Foundations Test Run Service Station Windows with C++ Going Places { End Bracket }

MSDN Magazine - April 2008

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