Book Image

High-Performance Programming in C# and .NET

By : Jason Alls
Book Image

High-Performance Programming in C# and .NET

By: Jason Alls

Overview of this book

Writing high-performance code while building an application is crucial, and over the years, Microsoft has focused on delivering various performance-related improvements within the .NET ecosystem. This book will help you understand the aspects involved in designing responsive, resilient, and high-performance applications with the new version of C# and .NET. You will start by understanding the foundation of high-performance code and the latest performance-related improvements in C# 10.0 and .NET 6. Next, you’ll learn how to use tracing and diagnostics to track down performance issues and the cause of memory leaks. The chapters that follow then show you how to enhance the performance of your networked applications and various ways to improve directory tasks, file tasks, and more. Later, you’ll go on to improve data querying performance and write responsive user interfaces. You’ll also discover how you can use cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure to build scalable distributed solutions. Finally, you’ll explore various ways to process code synchronously, asynchronously, and in parallel to reduce the time it takes to process a series of tasks. By the end of this C# programming book, you’ll have the confidence you need to build highly resilient, high-performance applications that meet your customer's demands.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1: High-Performance Code Foundation
7
Part 2: Writing High-Performance Code
16
Part 3: Threading and Concurrency

Generating and viewing memory dumps

When debugging in Visual Studio, if your program has stopped on a breakpoint or an exception, then the Save Dump As menu option becomes available in the Debug menu.

A minidump with a heap file provides a snapshot of an application's memory, shows the process that was running, and lists the modules that were loaded at a point in time. Dump files enable you to examine the stack, threads, and variables as they were within the application and memory at the point in time when the dump was saved.

You would save a minidump with heap files when testing software and a crash is encountered, and when a customer program crash cannot be replicated on your computer.

Let's go through the process of saving and loading a minidump with a heap file:

  1. Using our CH04_WeakReferences project, put a breakpoint on the following line in the program.cs file:
    Console.WriteLine("Press any key to continue.");
  2. Run the project to the breakpoint...