First, a blast from the past: remember those Rold Gold pretzels about which I waxed poetic when I discovered that they maintained their crunch 2 months later.  Well, I had a 3 hour drive to Indianapolis this afternoon for the UG presentation and I saw them once again in the cabinet.  Not having much else snackable to take with me, I shrugged, grabbed the bag and started on my way.

[Temporary jump off-topic] My bedroom growing up was in the basement of a ranch house in DeWitt, NY.  It was a finished basement and relatively clean, but potato bugs did have a habit of coming in from the cold for the winter.  There was also this "basement smell" - not quite musty, but not quite fresh either.

[Back to the pretzel story] When I took the first handful of preztels, everything seemed fine.  Another 5 months of compounded aging had very little effect on these pretzels.  As I continued to consume the pretzels, I suddenly had thoughts of my childhood.  I didn't immediately understand why, until I noticed that the aftertaste from the pretzels was now the very same "basement smell" I had grown up with.  Needless to say, I still finished all of the pretzels - despite the somewhat unpleasant aftertaste, they *did* still keep their crunch quite well.

In a couple hours I had made it to Indy, but not after passing a truck with the traditional "We hire safe drivers - call 800-XXX-XXXX for comments" with the entire latter portion painted over.  One would think that this driver was either a) not a very accurate painter or possibly b) not, in fact, a very safe driver.  I was somewhat nervous being in his vicinity, so I gunned my engine and sped past him.

I was presenting my "Need For Speed - Windows Forms Performance Tuning" session (available as an on-demand webcast) and the UG members became very animated and interactive, asking lots of questions and discussing different approaches to testing and optimizing performance.  I got to see some folks who had previously attended my MSDN Events in the area and invited everyone else to my upcoming event in March.  As promised, I have included links to additional information below, including the code we discussed in the session (available within the 2 articles).

This session was adapted from

How To: Use CLR Profiler
How To: Time Managed Code Using QueryPerformanceCounter and QueryPerformanceFrequency

Both of these articles are part of the 'patterns and practices' guide: Improving .NET Application Performance

I want to take a moment to thank Brad Jones for inviting me to present, the entire IndyNDA board for putting together such a cohesive user group, and all of the folks who came to my session tonight.  I had a great time and hope to present again for you all soon!

Happy Coding,
Jacob

PS On the way back, due to my unforeseen pretzel shortage, when I stopped for gas, I also picked up some of those delicious Twizzler Cherry Nibs.  You know the ones I'm talking about - the Twizzlers that look like factory rejects, but taste "oh, so delicious".