The Cost of Exceptions I wish I could speak intelligently on the exact cost but it's really quite difficult to project for any given usage, it's best measured for your specific cases. However there are a couple of different kinds of cost and they're...

I first wrote about this here , but I've since received several requests for more prescriptive advice on the subject. Again you can never be sure without understanding the exact usage pattern because the results really do vary widely but here's some general...

I wrote this article back in July and it ended up being the basis of this video (scroll to where it says “Thinking about Performance” and choose a speed) I was going to have the article edited and published seperately but somehow that never...

A while ago I asked Dr. GUI to post an MSDN article about the perils of using lock(typeof(Foo)), you can still find that article here . But recently I've started seeing another pattern that's just as bad: class MyClass { private static String...

This particular problem (I call it mid-life-crisis) seems to come up fairly often so I thought I'd write up some general advice on it. The symptoms go something like this: There is a server process (usually a web server) and that process has a high percentage...

Well here I am in my new home, feels comfy already. I copied my old postings here for easy reference, the originals with comments are still on http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/ricom , but there won't be any new articles there. Happy Holidays!

OK, I never give rules, because they always have exceptions, and I won't start today, but I'm gonna give a couple things that look like rules but aren't. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide when they should break these almost-rules :...

Eric Gunnerson told me he had some requests for information on how to get good locality of reference when using the CLR. This is a topic that's near and dear to me so that's all the provocation I needed to blog about it. I think first it's important...

I would never make a statement so bold as "Use Stringbuilders to concatenate" without having a deeper understanding of the concatenation pattern. I tend to give advice like "Many users find Stringbuilders useful for their concatenation pattens, consider...

Plugging my own video, I think it's pretty entertaining for a talk a performance, even has some content. :) http://gotdotnet.com/team/clr/about_clr_performance.aspx The points from the key slides are Rule #1: Measure Just thinking about...

I recently saw a posting where someone was considering a great deal of loop unrolling. I can imagine some exotic case where this is a good idea however in general it's more likely to be bad that good. For those that aren't familiar with the term, loop...