Chapter 14. High-Performance Programming

IN BRIEF

Throughout the rest of this book, you will see how to improve the performance of your ASP.NET web applications and speed up your Windows Forms applications, your Web Services, and much more.

You can learn all the performance techniques in the world for each application type, but they won't help you very much if the code you write at the lowest level doesn't run as fast or use memory as efficiently as it could.

This chapter will demonstrate how to create high-performance C# code by showing you valuable techniques for memory management, dealing with the Garbage Collector, and speed techniques to improve the basic code that will be used in web applications and Windows applications alike.

WHAT YOU NEED

REQUIRED SOFTWARE	.NET Framework SDK v1.1 Visual Studio .NET 2003 with C# installed
RECOMMENDED HARDWARE	PC that meets .NET SDK minimum requirements
SKILLS REQUIRED	C# and .NET familiarity

HIGH-PERFORMANCE PROGRAMMING AT A GLANCE

Introduction to Garbage Collection		295
	Garbage Collection InternalsGenerations	295	Caveat: Nondeterministic Finalization Versus Deconstruction	297
	Coding with the Garbage Collector in Mind	296
Memory and Class Management in the Common Language Runtime		300
	Boxing and Unboxing	300	Using the StringBuilder Class	303
	Collections and Boxing	302
High-Performance Code: Best Practices		305
	Using Exceptions	305	Tip: Using AddRange on Collections	307
	Chunky API Calls	305
	Value Versus Reference Types	306	Jagged Versus Rectangular Arrays	308
			For Versus Foreach	308
			Utilizing Asynchronous I/O	310
Summary		310
Further Reading		310