Summary

In this chapter, we examined the question of performance as it relates to .NET applications. We pointed out that the factors under your control that have the most influence on performance are chiefly related to high-level program architecture - even including the question of whether you should write code that targets the .NET runtime in the first place. We also saw a variety of tips for better programming practice in various .NET-compliant languages, which if followed will help to make your programs more efficient. As well as looking at the practical ways that you can improve performance, we took a fairly detailed look at how aspects of .NET in general, and the JIT compiler in particular help with performance under the hood. In this context, I explained some of the specific JIT optimizations that can occur, and also how to enable or disable JIT optimizations.

The other side to performance is that you often need to find out where the bottlenecks are before examining how to improve the performance of your code. In the next chapter, we'll look at profiling managed code in detail.