I wish I could remember where I first read it because perhaps it deserves attribution. But many years ago I read about the two world views of physicists and they resonated with me. One world view is that prescibed by things like General Relativity and Maxwell's Equations . These have, in some sense a...

I still get questions that amount to "should I ngen my <something>" from time to time and the best answer I can give is still "it depends." I wrote this article many years ago, and I'd say it's still pretty accurate: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/archive/2004/10/18/244242.aspx Essentially the...

This series can still be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff649152.aspx While some of the content is stale since it refers specifically to .NET 2.0 I think all of the conceptual content broadly applicable (even beyond managed code systems to software systems generally.) If...

Many problems you will face are actually the building data access layer, sometimes thinly disguised, sometimes in your face; it’s one of the broad patterns that you see in computer science – as the cliché says: it keeps rearing its ugly head. Despite this, the same sorts of mistakes...

I can’t say I’ve asked the framework guidelines folks about this but I’m fairly sure there would be a lot of agreement from the guidelines gurus; so in the spirit of approximately correct advice I give you Rico’s Guidelines for Performant Properties. I should start by saying...

I know I haven't posted for a while; I'm hoping that will change soon. However in the mean time my daughter forwarded me this link because she thought it was cute. The thing is, she didn't realize it should be my theme song. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMsQYjYlBEo It's rule #1 http://blogs...

I don’t know that it is possible to write anything like a unitary software system in a way that is truly loosely coupled. It’s not that you can’t make boxes and lines that are cleanly separated in all sorts of pretty ways, though that’s hard enough. The problem is that even if...

It’s been a long time since I included my “this discussion is only approximately correct” disclaimer so I’ll just preface it here. In the interest of space and clarity, this discussion is only approximately correct. OK, now we can move on… I love micro-benchmarks. Really. I rely on micro-benchmarks...

I’m not especially a great fan of micro-benchmarks, they’re handy as a compliment to the larger tests but I often find that they lead to confusion because they are interpreted as reflecting reality when nothing could be farther from the truth. The fact is that micro-benchmarks are intended to magnify...

If I have any readers left out there, they might be interested to know what it is I’m up to this month. It’s a very important something. It’s... my vacation! Ok, seriously, I am in fact on vacation and I’ll be out for the next few weeks mostly because I’ve been working really hard on VS performance for...

Disclaimer: This is yet another of my trademarked "approximately correct" discussions From time to time customers or partners ask me about our plans to create a 64 bit version of Visual Studio. When is it coming? Why aren’t we making it a priority? Haven’t we noticed that 64 bit PC’s are very popular...

Part 1 of this series talked about the startup problems we face. In Part 2, I want to talk about the editor. Many people have reported that editing with the new editor is slower. I’ve experienced the same thing myself so I certainly do not want to accuse people of hallucinating but I thought it might...

I want to start by thanking everyone that has commented on the Beta (by posting their thoughts here or elsewhere) for doing so. Please keep those comments coming! They have a great impact on the senior leadership here and they are excellent rallying points for all the teams. They really do make a difference...

At Microsoft you can't say you're excited about anything you have to say that you're "super excited". I don't know why that's just the way it is . So, I'm happy to say that I'm super excited about the release of Beta 1 and I encourage you all to visit Jason's blog (again) to see screen-shots and get...

Jason has a new posting on the progress of Visual Studio and I wanted to chime in myself. Some people have been wondering what I’ve been up to… I think you’ll be happy to hear that about 2 months ago I put down a bunch of my long term planning responsibilities so that I could work on Visual Studio performance...

While I was at PDC2008 I was introduced to Keith and Woody -- pretty soon there was a microphone in front of me and we were doing a podcast. Now I already liked these guys but when they used a picture of me from about 1998 I really liked them a lot more. I wish I still looked like that :). And the...

I'm happy to announce that I will be at PDC2008 (and I will work the booths until I can't speak) but in particular I'll be kicking off this precon event with my longtime colleagues Mark, Joe, and Vance. Come on out, I'd love to meet some of my readers! Performance by Design: Using the .NET Framework...

We had an internal thread on this yesterday, maybe I was a little too glib but here is what I had to say about the topic [edited so it can be read standalone] The original question, “Is performance a functional requirement” is highly unexciting for me. However the revised question, “What is the best...

I did a series of postings on Linq Compiled Queries last year, I recently got some questions on those postings that I thought would be of general interest. Q1: Why use the 'new' keyword in this snippet? var q = from o in nw.Orders select new {o.everything …}; A: If you did just : var...

Even though I've been doing general architecture work on Visual Studio for nearly a year now, my friends in DDPERF are still plugging away on performance problems and finding some interesting results. This most recent thread is very interesting because it shows yet another example of how the consequences...

I think my current performance pet peeve is shutdown. Assorted flavors of it, they all seem to have the same kind of problem. Sometimes we're stuck with it... but maybe we shouldn't be? This is one time when our basic training, which normally I love so much, tends to let us down. We were all taught...

As you know I presented my performance signatures paper at the Computer Measurement Group's (CMG) conference a little over a year ago and I am happy to announce that CMG is now offering previous proceedings from 2005 and older to the public .  I think this is a fabulous move by them because there...

Well is there really a "solution" at all in general? This particular case I think I constrained enough that you can claim an answer but does it generalize? Let's look at what I got first, the raw results are pretty easy to understand. The experiment I conducted was to run a fixed number of queries...

I've written a few articles about Linq now and you know I was a big fan of compiled queries in Linq but what do they cost? Or more specifically, how many times to you have to use a compiled query in order for the cost of compilation to pay for itself? With regular expressions for instance it's usually...

A few months ago, Mary Gray of the Management Practices Team came to talk to me about good practices for creating performance counters and doing measurements generally. She interviewed me on the topic for about an hour and was madly scribbling notes the whole time while I talked a mile a minute. What...