The sunday of PDC is traditionally focussed around a few session that delve a little bit deeper into the subject than you would normally have on an normal PDC session. I attended (a little bit late I must admit but luckily Rob did text me) a session on Design for performance. Rob did sit thru the whole session and updated me quickly on what Rico Mariani told. Nice to see that some tools I already stumbled across in the last year or so (like vadump, clrprofiler) are getting more and more friends. One of them is xperf, or the Windows Performance Toolkit. It enables you to capture performance traces for your box. The whole range of tools for tracing and logging on the windows platform are still somewhat scattered and are not yet on the end-to-end monitoring that tools like AppSight (now from BMC) provide. However the Microsoft Teams are working on it and we will get solutions in the next year.
Another tool worth mentioning is MeasureIt. Nice to see Vance Morrison use his own tool to demo the different performance characteristics of single operations in the framework. He is really an performance architect to my heart. Working out which collection classes you should use (none), how a faster serailizer can be written and best of all find a performance bug in Activator.CreateInstance, a bug that is going to be solved.
Rob did log the most interesting links:
Measure Early and Often for Performance, part 1 & part 2
- What Every Dev Must Know About Multithreaded Apps
- Visual Round Trip Analyzer (vrta.msi) link (still) broken…
- Vadump
- Windows Performance Tools Kit
If you are into performance it is worth getting your hands on the deck...