I remember back in 2000 I was messing with .NET (actually, I was architecting real systems (for gutsy customers) with the beta, but we'll call it 'messing'). In that time-frame, the focus was clearly on JIT compiling the code, and NGen (which has been around since 1.0) was not really spoken about very much.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that NGen has been greatly enhanced in .NET 2.0. Kit George, CLR PM, spoke about this a little at Tech Ed 2004, and there is a fine article coming up in MSDN Magazine for April. It has been already published on the web, and you can find it here:

NGen Revs Up Your Performance with Powerful New Features by Reid Wilkes. It's a pretty well written piece and it has solid information for people new to NGen and plenty for those of us who have always cared.

Highlights of improvements include:

• It's invoked on an entire app, not just on an assembly. This allows for dependency enhancements.
• NGen has a tracking and updating mechanism so that a shared component is later updated, NGen can keep apps informed of the changes.
• Deferred commands so that the generation of large images can be done by the NGen Windows service.
• Native images can be shared across application domains in a process (this is huge!)
• Generics support in NGen

OK- NGen is not that sexy and cool, but if you care about app performance alot (and you should), it's very alluring. Congrats on a nice article, Reid.

 Rock Thought for the day: Once again heard "Hunger Strike" from project band Temple of the Dog in 1990. It's a favorite on the alternative station here in Seattle. It's a decent song, but what is more interesting is how many people trace a path through this song. You have Jeff Ament, Chris Cornell, Stone Gossard, Eddie Vedder, and Andrew Wood (inspiration for the tune). If these names do not mean much to you...it's time to do some reading up on the history of rock an roll over the past 16 years. Also, Rage Against the Machine was easily one of the most important bands within that time frame. Amazing sounds. Audioslave keeps the heavy, killer riffs coming. Heavier than Heaven.

Rock On (Vote for Pedro)