What this book covers
Chapter 1, Introducing C# 10.0 and .NET 6, talks about the Common Language Runtime (CLR). You will start by learning about what’s new in C# 10.0 and .NET 6. Then you will learn about the .NET native runtime and CoreCLR. Next, you will learn about the unified BCL followed by Windows Store performance. Finally, you will learn about ASP.NET 5 performance.
Chapter 2, Implementing C# Interoperability, introduces Microsoft .NET interoperability. You will learn how to call and dispose of unsafe code. You will also learn how to migrate legacy COM programs to .NET using COM interoperability. In this chapter, you will learn how to create .NET libraries and components and use them in legacy COM applications. By the end of the chapter, you will have learned how to consume COM components in .NET and how to consume .NET applications in COM components. This will help you to migrate COM applications over to the .NET platform.
Chapter 3, Predefined Data Types and Memory Allocations, explores C# primitive types and C# object types. You will learn about the stack and the heap and about passing data by reference and by value. Then you will learn about boxing and unboxing and their implications on application performance. You will also be refreshed on the C# primitive type, and how to build objects that perform well.
Chapter 4, Memory Management, talks about the garbage collector. You will learn how to use tracing and diagnostics to track down performance issues and the cause of memory leaks. Then you will learn about object generations and how the garbage collector decides what to dispose of. You will also learn about weak references and how to correctly dispose of objects in order to prevent memory leaks.
Chapter 5, Application Profiling and Tracing, teaches you how to profile your applications to identify poor areas of performance. You will learn about code metrics and how to perform static code analysis. In your drive to write code that is more performant, you will learn to make use of memory dumps, the loaded modules viewer, debugging, tracing, and dotnet-counters. By the time you have completed this chapter, you will have the skills and experience you need to profile your own applications.
Chapter 6, The .NET Collections, explores the collections framework. You will learn about the different collections and how to best use them to get maximum performance from them. You will access the various collections in the System.Collection, System.Collection.Concurrent, and System.Collections.Generic namespaces. You will also create your own custom exceptions and learn how to query collections using LINQ.
Chapter 7, LINQ Performance, explains how to perform LINQ queries with performance in mind. Depending on how you use LINQ, different methods that return the same result can behave and perform differently. And so, in this chapter, you will learn how best to perform queries on LINQ to improve the performance of your applications.
Chapter 8, File and Stream I/O, explains how to improve file and directory performance. You will learn ways to improve directory tasks, file tasks, memory tasks, and isolated storage tasks. In this book, you will learn how to write to files asynchronously and read from files asynchronously.
Chapter 9, Enhancing the Performance of Networked Applications, breaks down how to speed up the performance of network applications. You will learn how to communicate over a network using the TCP and UDP network protocols. Then you will learn how to perform network tracing processes with the OSI Network Layer Reference Model and a selection of TCP and UDP networking protocols. Cache management will also be covered so that you can improve the efficiency of resource retrieval.
Chapter 10, Setting Up Our Database Project, sets up the Northwind database project on SQL Server as we will be using this database in the next section to benchmark data access methods.
Chapter 11, Benchmarking Relational Data Access Frameworks, benchmarks three different ways to manipulate SQL Server database data. We will be performing a side-by-side comparison of Entity Framework, ADO.NET, and Dapper.NET. After running the benchmarks for each of these data access and object mappers, you will be able to make an educated judgment call on the best form of data access and object mapping for your projects.
Chapter 12, Responsive User Interfaces, explains how to write responsive user interfaces. You will write responsive Windows Forms (WinForms), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), ASP.NET, .NET MAUI, and WinUI applications. Using background worker threads, you will see how you can update and work with the user interface in real time by running long-running tasks in the background.
Chapter 13, Distributed Systems, describes distributed applications and explains how to improve their performance. You will learn how to build performant distributed applications using the Command Query Responsibility Separation (CQRS) software design pattern, event sourcing, and microservices. You will see how to use cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure to build scalable distributed solutions using Cosmos DB, Azure Functions, and the open source Pulumi infrastructure tool.
Chapter 14, Multi-Threaded Programming, explores what threads and threading are and discusses background and foreground threads. Then you will learn how to pass data into threads before you run them. You will also learn how to pause, interrupt, destroy, schedule, and cancel threads.
Chapter 15, Parallel Programming, explains how to take advantage of the multiple CPU cores that are available in today’s modern computers. You will learn how to process your code by distributing the work between processes concurrently.
Chapter 16, Asynchronous Programming, demystifies the Task Asynchronous Programming (TAP) model. You will learn how to program tasks asynchronously and access web resources using async, await, and WhenAll. You will also look at different return types, how to extract the required results, and how to correctly cancel asynchronous operations and perform asynchronous file reading and writing.