Writing High-Performance .NET Code. B. Watson

 .NET is an amazing system for building software. It allows us to build functional, connected apps in a fraction of the time it would have taken us a decade ago. So much of it just works, and that is a great thing. It offers applications memory and type safety, a robust framework library, services like automatic memory management, and so much more. Programs written with .NET are called managed applications because they depend on a runtime and framework that manages many of their vital tasks and ensures a basic safe operating environment. Unlike unmanaged, or native, software written directly to the operating system’s APIs, managed applications do not have free reign of their process. This layer of management between your program and the computer’s processor can be a source of anxiety for developers who assume that it must add some significant overhead. This book will set you at ease, demonstrate that the overhead is worth it, and that the supposed performance degradation is almost always exaggerated. Often, the performance problems developers blame on .NET are actually due to poor coding patterns and a lack of knowledge of how to optimize their programs on this framework. Skills gained from years of optimizing software written in C++, Java, or VB may not always apply to managed code, and some advice is actually detrimental. Sometimes the rapid development nature of .NET can encourage people to build bloated, slow, poorly optimized code faster than ever before. Certainly, there are other reasons why code can be of poor quality: lack of skill generally, time pressure, poor design, lack of developer resources, laziness, and so on. This book will explicitly remove lack of knowledge about the framework as an excuse and attempt to deal with some of the others as well. With the principles explained in this book, you will learn how to build lean, fast, efficient applications that avoid these missteps. In all types of code, in all platforms, the same thing is true: if you want performant code, you have to work for it.