C# Performance Architect

A couple of years ago I was living and working in Belgium. I joined a small team of SharePoint specialists to build a custom application for a financial institution in Brussels. We were writing a lot of hand-coded C#.

I worked with a colleague who was fresh out of college with a computer science education under his belt. But I noticed something very interesting: even though he could write perfectly functional C# code, nobody had ever taught him how to write fast and efficient code.

Here's an example. Take a look at these two code snippets:

Which code snippet do you think is the fastest?

Now, to be fair, my colleague had heard of a StringBuilder. But nobody had ever explained to him why it exists, so he didn’t realize when he should use it.

Seasoned C# developers will know that the code on the left is extremely inefficient for large loops because in C# strings are optimized for comparing, not for modifying. The heap will be littered with out-of-scope copies of the string. We're supposed to use the StringBuilder class here, because it is optimized for modifying.

But let’s face it: the NET Framework is huge. For any given problem there are many competing solutions, and it is not always clear which solution is the best choice.

I created this course specifically for people like my colleague: developers who already have a working knowledge of C# programming, but who want to learn how to write fast and efficient code, and gain more understanding of what is going on under the hood of the .NET Framework.