Book Review: Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability

This book is an outstanding cookbook full of optimization recipes. It’s a 1,100-page compilation of performance optimization “best practices” for those who have a butt made of iron to sit through reading it. Since I’ve read it all… :)

I can compare this book to cough syrup: it might taste gross, but it does you good. It’s a dry, but necessary read for anyone who is serious about developing for the .NET Framework. I’ve learned quite a few useful tips, and I’ve been able to dig into our product, tweak it armed with this knowledge and see immediate performance gains. In this sense the book pays for itself many times over.

Here’s what I suggest you do: the next time somebody talks about caching, open up this book and read up on various gotchas of caching. The same goes for sessions, asynchronous communication, collections (in fact, it wasn’t until I hit the section on collections that I realized how confused I was), text manipulation, XML, etc. Research! Become an educated developer! Don’t just rely on somebody’s opinion to run your production code.

You don’t really have to buy this book. You can download it from Microsoft for free as a PDF, or simply read it online. By the way, check out the list of contributors! You can bet it has gone through some rigorous polishing.

You don’t have to read the whole volume from cover to cover either. The book is partitioned into 17 chapters and a handful of “how-to”s (a must see!). For example, I skipped the sections on web services (I’m still not buying into the hype yet), remoting (you’ll have to drag me kicking and screaming to make me distribute our objects again) and COM+.

I first heard about this book during a web cast some time last year and couldn’t wait to see it in print. It’s a great reference, and I’m sure you’ll find yourself going back to it more than once.