Sasha Goldshtein - Pro .NET Performance: Optimize Your C# Applications

Pro .NET Per formance

Sasha Goldshtein

Dima Zurbalev

Ido Flatow

Pro .NET Performance

Copyright 2012 by Sasha Goldshtein, Dima Zurbalev, and Ido Flatow

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. Exempted from this legal reservation are brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis or material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Duplication of this publication or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions of the Copyright Law of the Publishers location, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer. Permissions for use may be obtained through RightsLink at the Copyright Clearance Center. Violations are liable to prosecution under the respective Copyright Law.

ISBN-13 (pbk): 978-1-4302-4458-5

ISBN-13 (electronic): 978-1-4302-4459-2

Trademarked names, logos, and images may appear in this book. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, logo, or image we use the names, logos, and images only in an editorial fashion and to the benefit of the trademark owner, with no intention of infringement of the trademark.

The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights.

While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication, neither the authors nor the editors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions that may be made. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein.

President and Publisher: Paul Manning

Lead Editor: Gwenan Spearing

Developmental Editor: Gwenan Spearing

Technical Reviewers: Todd Meister and Fabio Claudio Ferracchiati

Editorial Board: Steve Anglin, Ewan Buckingham, Gary Cornell, Louise Corrigan, Morgan Ertel, Jonathan Gennick, Jonathan Hassell, Robert Hutchinson, Michelle Lowman, James Markham, Matthew Moodie, Jeff Olson, Jeffrey Pepper, Douglas Pundick, Ben Renow-Clarke, Dominic Shakeshaft, Gwenan Spearing, Matt Wade, Tom Welsh

Coordinating Editors: Corbin Collins and Kevin Shea

Copy Editor: Lori Cavanaugh

Compositor: SPi Global

Indexer: SPi Global

Artist: SPi Global

Cover Designer: Anna Ishchenko

Distributed to the book trade worldwide by Springer Science+Business Media New York, 233 Spring Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10013. Phone 1-800-SPRINGER, fax (201) 348-4505, e-mail orders-ny@springer-sbm.com , or visit www.springeronline.com .

For information on translations, please e-mail rights@apress.com , or visit www.apress.com .

Apress and friends of ED books may be purchased in bulk for academic, corporate, or promotional use. eBook versions and licenses are also available for most titles. For more information, reference our Special Bulk SaleseBook Licensing web page at www.apress.com/bulk-sales .

Any source code or other supplementary materials referenced by the author in this text is available to readers at www.apress.com/9781430244585 . For more information about how to locate your books source code, go to www.apress.com/source-code .

To my loving wife Dina, who is the sunshine of my life. To my parents Boris and Marina, for making all the sacrifices so I dont have to.

Sasha

To my lovely wife Efrat, for reminding me that a muse is not gone, it is just playing hide and seek.

Ido

Contents at a Glance

Contents

Foreword

The original Desktop .NET Framework turned 10 years old recently (Feb 2012). I have been on the team since its very inception, and for over half that time I have acted as its performance architect, so that 10th birthday got me thinking about where .NET has been, where it is going, and whats the right way to think about .NET performance. The chance to write a foreword on a book dedicated to .NET performance gave me the opportunity to write these thoughts down.

Programmer productivity has always been and will always be the fundamental value of the .NET framework. Garbage collection (GC) is the single most important feature that boosts productivity, not only because it avoids a broad class of nasty bugs (memory corruption), but also because it allows class libraries to be written without being cluttered with error-prone resource allocation conventions (no more passing buffers, or subtle rules about who is responsible for deleting memory). Strong type safety (which now includes Generics) is another important pillar because it captures a broad class of programmer intent (e.g., this list is homogeneous) and allows tools to find many bugs well before the program is ever run. It also enforces strong contracts between software components, which is very important for class libraries and large projects. The lack of strong typing in languages like JavaScript will always place them at a disadvantage as software scales. On top of these two pillars we added a class library that was designed for ease of use (very uniform, simple interfaces, consistent naming conventions, etc.). I am very proud of the result; we have built a system for building code whose productivity is second to none.