Vance Morrison's Weblog

Hurray, its finally fixed! manage code 'just works' from network file share! Now I know that some of you are probably just saying 'who cares' or 'huh?' but for those of us who have hit this problem, this has been a major deployment headache, and I...

In a previous posting , I mentioned that .NET V3.5 Service Pack 1 had significant improvements in the Just in time (JIT) compiler for the X86 platform, and in particular its ability to inline methods was improved (especially for methods with value type...

In my article What Every Dev Must Know About Multithreaded Apps I discuss the fundamental principles of using locks correctly. In that article I strongly encourage the use of reader-writer locks because these locks create the protection you need (insuring...

Introduction: What does ‘foreach’ actually do? It is not uncommon for a new group to want to use manage code to pepper the CLR team with performance questions. They want to know how expensive ‘foreach’ is, or whether certain methods get inlined...

I know it is has been a while since my last posting, but long ago I decided that I would not write just to have something to write about but rather only when I had something I really something useful to say. Well do have something really useful to...

For those that don't know, PerfView is a performance profiling tool that can be used to diagnose a broad range of performance problems. We released a free copy of this to the web back in January. Well, it has been over 6 months since that release and...

In my EventSource demo blog entry we defined an EventSource and turned on the logging with the command PerfView /OnlyProviders= *MinimalEventSource run eventSourceDemo.exe Which turned on all the events defined in the 'MinimalEventSource' we defined...

Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) is a fast, scalable logging mechanism built into the Windows operating system. It is powerful because of three reasons The operating system comes pre-wired with a bunch of useful events It can capture stack traces...

In my last post I posted readerWriterDemo.cs which is an implementation of a Reader-Writer lock. I held it up as an example of good design of a concurrent data structure. I want to now show you a bit of what my thinking was when it was designed and what...

A few years ago now, several of us on the .NET Runtime team where lamenting how unapproachable the code base was for new developers to the team. We agreed that more commenting would certainly help the situation, but that alone was not enough, because...

My performance blog entries to date have been 'foundational'. In entries so far, I talk about how to use Visual Studio to look at the native code generated for the runtime. With this foundation, we can now start exploring what the native code for managed...

I have let my blog laps for too long. I am back to blogging. I realized reciently that we have simply not written down many interesting facts about how the runtime actually works. I want to fix this. Coming up in future blogs I am going to be doing a...

In my last blog , I demonstrated how to use the .NET SOS.DLL extension DLL in the Visual Studio. In this entry I will use the capabilities of this extension DLL to dig into the way the .NET framework handles interface dispatch. As with all my blog entries...

This is a quick entry to warn about a pitfall that you are likely to run into sooner or later if you build or maintain EventSources. As I have blogged about, it is very easy to get started with EventSources. Here is some code that someone might write...

In my introduction to EventSource posting and my posting of the EventSource specification , I tried to give you the 'quick start' for using EventSource to generate ETW events from C# (or any .NET language). In this posting I would like to back a bit...

Almost a year ago now I wrote part 1 and part 2 of a MSDN article entitled 'Measure Early and Measure Often for Good Performance'. In this article I argued that if you want to design high performance applications you need to be measuring performance early...

I have just posted the following 3 videos to the my Channel 9 PerfView Tutorial Series . Perfview Tutorial 6 - The Event Viewer Basics PerfView Tutorial 7 - Using the Event Viewer in ASP.NET Scenarios PerfView Tutorial 8 - Generating Your...

For several years now, I have had code called the 'TraceEvent library' that allows you to access ETW files (ETL files) from C#. However for over a year now, I have not updated the public version of that library. Well, that time has ended. I updated...

What's Coming in .NET Runtime Performance in Version V3.5 SP1 It certainly has been a while since I last blogged. Most of this is laziness on my part, but I can truthfully say that it is partly because I have been busy trying to get the next servicing...

In my last blog I talked about some of the conditions than need to hold for the cold startup formula ColdStartupTimeMSec = WarmStartupTimeMsec + 4 * NumberOfReads + 20 * NumberMBytes To be accurate. I mentioned that if you have overlap between the...

In my last blog I talked a bit about how you go about using Visual Studio to look at "Release" code so that you can find out what code is actually generated by a particular high level programming construct. As a quick recap the tricky part of insuring...

These are the slides for the second (of 3) talks I gave on 10/26/2008 at the Programmer Developer Converence (PDC) memory investigation.

In previous blocks on TraceEvent I shows you how easy it was to start up ETW sessions to collect information generated by System.Diagnnostics.Tracing.EventSource classes (typically logging that you yourself did). But I also mentioned in other blogs that...

About two years ago now I wrote part 1 and part 2 of a MSDN article entitled 'Measure Early and Measure Often for Good Performance'. In this article I mention some 'perf mantra' which is that Every application deserves a 'perf plan' (which and be...

These are the slides for the talk I gave on 10/26/2008 at the Programmer Developer Converence (PDC) on the basics of performance investigation