I agreed with my collegages to attend the asp.net performance session. It was a very practical session. Interesting was to see the use of the Application Center Test tool which I used havilly on a former project. In the slides there where some high-water marks given for the various performance counters so that will be helpful to actually underdstand what you are actually measuring. Als more general tools like CLRprofiler will come handy.
Are there really programmers out there that don't use SqlProfiler? I can't imagine that. We had some discussion on whether to use a Dataset or DataReader: answer: use your own dataobjects and fill them with a datareader. I personally feel that every GUI layer that has a conection to a database (like the datareader does) is poor design so I liked the trade-off.
The the demo shifted to the use Cache(actually OutputCache). Incredible pefformance gain. I never digged very deep into it but a jump from 150 pps to 600 pps is very nice. in IIS6 this performance gain can become better as the kernel mode http.sys actually understands OutputCache hints from the asp.net worker process which means that subsequent request for the same page will be served by http.sys preventing any switch from kernel mode to user mode.