Section 4.3. Performance Considerations

4.3. Performance Considerations

When I mentioned that you would be using MapPoint 2004 COM interoperable assemblies from your managed code, you may have been worried about performance. There is reason to worry, mainly because the COM interoperable assemblies add a layer of abstraction that necessitates marshalling across the process boundaries and type conversion between the managed and unmanaged types.

The good news is that you can avoid (or at least minimize) these issues by using:

• Add-Ins to minimize the marshalling across the process boundaries

• Visual C++ (with or without Managed Extensions) to write your client applications, minimizing type conversions

If you are curious about performance gains, here are my findings: when I ran performance tests for SQL data imported from the North Wind database using the C# import process and using the Add-Ins, the Add-Ins method ran 25% faster than the direct application programming with MapPoint types. That's considerable performance improvement.

Along the same lines, using Visual C++ (with or without managed extensions) can improve the speed and reduce memory requirements of your application.