.NET news » Performance

The latest version of ASP.NET, version 2.0, supports several new and exciting features that promise to enhance developer productivity, administration and management, extensibility, and performance. One of these features is precompilation, which either developers or administrators can use to precompile ASP.NET applications before they are deployed. Moreover, the new precompilation feature can detect and provide warnings about any compilation failure issues, and lets you deploy applications without the need to store the source code on the deployment server. Precompilation can both reduce application response time and improve performance. This article explains how to use the new feature effectively.

.NET provides flexible data-binding and runtime property access, but by default this is via reflection an is known to be relatively slow. This article uses the power of Reflection.Emit to provide a pre-compiled (and much accelerated) implementation for reflection properties, and demonstrates the use of TypeDescriptionProvider to dynamically apply this implementation to types.

A lot of technical details are included, but this code is all provided in the source; as a consumer you have to do almost nothing. Really. You may wish to jump ahead to the usage scenarios, then dip back if you want to know what makes it all work.

This column is less about the mechanics of a common language runtime (CLR) feature and more about how to efficiently use what you’ve got at your disposal. Selecting the right data structures and algorithms is, of course, one of the most common yet important decisions a programmer must make. The wrong choice can make the difference between success and failure or, as is the case most of the time, good performance and, well, terrible performance. Given that parallel programming is often meant to improve performance and that it is generally more difficult than serial programming, the choices are even more fundamental to your success.

In this column, we'll take a look at nine reusable data structures and algorithms that are common to many parallel programs and that you should be able to adapt with ease to your own .NET software. Each example is accompanied by fully working, though not completely hardened, tested, and tuned, code. The list is by no means exhaustive, but it represents some of the more common patterns. As you'll notice, many of the examples build on each other.

The .NET framework and the C# language provide two methods for conditional processing where multiple discrete values can be selected from. The switch statement is less flexible than the if-else-if ladder but is generally considered to be more efficient.

Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) provides general-purpose, high-speed tracing of events raised by both user-mode applications and kernel-mode device drivers. Learn how ETW can improve your development and debugging work.

A distilled methodology for detecting and isolating NHibernate-related performance and scalability issues

The Simple Performance Chart is a UserControl that is designed and developed to display varying performance data like reads per second on a disk drive, the bandwidth for a server, or free CPU resources, in a visual, clean manner. It can be controlled by a built-in Timer, which makes synchronized display of values possible. The control offers several formatting options like border style, line colors and styles, widths, a background gradient, and so on.

An article on improving the performance of an algorithm by replacing integer divisions

Software must operate at a speed that is acceptable to the end user. Often large improvements can be made by improving the speed of short-lived but heavily used routines. The speed of these can be accurately measured using the .NET 2.0 Stopwatch class.

Explore ways to reduce page load time, manage state efficiently, scale back on memory use, handle resources better, and improve data access in your ASP.NET applications.