Archives for posts with tag: performance

First code profiler for Silverlight

February 19, 10 //

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Join ISV Developer Evangelist Henrik Westergaard Hansen from Microsoft Denmark as he sits down with lead developer Richard Flamsholt to talk about EQATEC’s latest offering: the first publicly available code profiler for Silverlight applications.

The company’s EQATEC Profiler was released back in April 2008 to much appreciation among developers because it was – and still is – the world’s only code profiler for .NET Compact Framework applications, and also quite easy to use. Now, EQATEC has leveraged that technology in the newly released version 3.1 of their profiler so it works with Silverlight applications, too, as well as full .NET and .NETCF apps.

Join Henrik and Richard for two actual demonstrations and a talk about how this code profiler works internally and what the secret is. An early version of the SilverFace application Scott Guthrie showcased at PDC09 is briefly profiled, as is EQATEC’s own large Silverlight client-app for their EQATEC Analytics service. In that client a real performance bottleneck is identified and fixed so data in a particular view loads 2.25 times faster.

Download EQATEC Profiler at http://www.eqatec.com/tools/profiler and follow @eqatec on Twitter.

Jason Zander: Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate Released – General Download Available

February 9, 10 //

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The Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate is here! Your Beta 2 feedback has been incredibly helpful to the engineering team. A big Thank You from Visual Studio!

Here, Visual Studio General Manager Jason Zander sits down with us to discuss how the Visual Studio engineering team addressed your Beta 2 feedback and made some helpful updates to the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate. Jason even demos some of the improvements made in the VS 2010 RC — and on quite a modest PC.

Jason and his team went to great lengths to improve the overall experience of writing applications inside VS 2010. Performance. Performance. Performance… Of course, Jason and team want you to have the final word regarding whether the updates hit the mark, so please download the RC and take it for a test drive. Your feedback is critical to the VS team and they thank you, as always.

The Access Show: Client performance improvements against SharePoint lists

February 5, 10 //

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Today’s guest is DJ Cole, architect and primary developer of SharePoint connectivity performance improvements on the Access development team. DJ dropped by to talk about how Access 2010 connects to SharePoint, and to discuss the work necessary for improving client-side performance.

As with most performance work, beauty is in the eye of the user. When users work against a server on the other side of the world, performance makes a difference. Data, after all, only travels as fast as the speed of light. Our goal for Access 2010 was to make the connections to SharePoint lists nearly as fast as local tables. Additionally, we had to ensure requests didn’t swamp the server, bottleneck throughout the network, or cause the client machine’s CPU or RAM to thrash. We found that caching data in local tables, combined with conservative usage of resources on the server, network and local machine, provided the best user experience.

This Access 2010 performance improvement builds upon the Access 2007 architecture. Read more…

For additional information about the latest release, check out the Access 2010 Intro series on the Access team blog.

Wes Dyer: Controlling Concurrency in Rx

December 18, 09 //

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The Rx team has received a lot of questions about Rx and concurrency, thread-affinity, timers and performance. In this video, Wes explains the major changes in the latest release of Rx.

These changes drastically improve the user experience. Your feedback inspired the future direction of Rx.

New bits can be found on the Rx DevLabs page

Nutrients for Better Mental Performance

December 3, 09 //

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Nutrients for Better Mental Performance

Google Tech Talk December 2, 2009 ABSTRACT Presented by Steven Wm. Fowkes. The talk will answer questions like: 1. Which nutrients promote optimal brain function? 2. What nutrients are commonly deficient enough to impair mental performance? 3. How can you get a better nights sleep without Ambien? 4. What nutrients counteract aspects of aging? 5. Is there an alternative to serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SRI) antidepressants? 6. What modern nutrition myths lead us to consume products that sabotage healthy brain function? 7. What tests can you get from your doctor? 8. What nutrients affect appetite, alertness, and tension? 9. What nutrient combo will prevent hangovers 90% of the time? About Steven Wm. Fowkes Steven Wm. Fowkes is the Director of the Cognitive Enhancement Research Institute and a co-author of the book Smart Drugs II. He has appeared on Larry King Live and in two anti-aging documentaries. Steve will explain how different nutritions can help people of all ages treat various physical and mental conditions, spanning from genetic disorders such as Down syndrome, to adolescent behavior problems and on to senility and Alzheimer's disease in the elderly. He will also speak about using nutrients to address memory problems as well as verbal and multi-tasking challenges that the testosterone-poised homo sapiens (ie, men) are commonly known for. In the Q&A feel free to ask him how to use nutrients to improve ones sense of humor.

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How and When Prototyping Practices Affect Design Performance

November 20, 09 //

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How and When Prototyping Practices Affect Design Performance

Google Tech Talk November 19, 2009 ABSTRACT Presented by Steven Dow. How does the structure of prototyping practice affect learning, motivation, and performance? In this talk, I will describe research on iteration and comparison, two key principles for discovering contextual design variables and their interrelationships. We found that, even under tight time constraints when the common intuition is to stop iterating and start refining, iterative prototyping helps designers learn. Our results also demonstrate that creating and receiving feedback on multiple prototypes in parallel — as opposed to serially — leads to more divergent concepts, more explicit comparison, less investment in a single concept, and better overall design performance. This talk highlights relevant research in cognitive and social psychology and shares the results of our preliminary design studies. Steven Dow is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the HCI Group at Stanford University where he researches human-computer interaction, creative problem-solving, prototyping practices, and computing for education and entertainment. He is a co-recipient of a Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Research Grant 2009-10. He received an MS and phd in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Institute of Technology and a BS in Industrial Engineering from University of Iowa.

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GTAC 2009 – Automated Performance Test Data Collection and R

November 6, 09 //

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GTAC 2009 – Automated Performance Test Data Collection and R

Google Tech Talk October 22, 2009 ABSTRACT Automated Performance Test Data Collection and Reporting. Presented by David Burns and David Henderson, smartfocus DIGITAL, at the 4th Annual Google Test Automation Conference, October 21st, 22nd, 2009, Zurich, CH Web applications are growing in size and complexity with every new release. The addition of slightly more javascript and HTML can lead to the site becoming sluggish without an obvious cause. Fortunately more organizations are taking note …

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Thread Visualization in the VS2010 Profiler

October 27, 09 //

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Join James Rapp once again as he dives deeper into the new parallel performance analysis tools available in Visual Studio 2010. In this video, he discusses ways of managing the quantity of data presented by the profiler and how to obtain meaningful statistics about your parallel application.

Check-out the following additional resources:
- The Parallel Visualization Blog
- The MSDN Parallel Computing Dev-Center
- Visual Studio 2010 on Learning Center
- Download Visual Studio 2010 beta2
- Hazim Shafi’s Blog on Windows Parallel Performance Tools

New Parallel Capabilities of the Visual Studio 2010 Profiler

October 21, 09 //

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Visual Studio 2010 (currently in beta) includes new Parallel Performance Analysis tools. The new Profiler is a must-have tool for Developers interested in designing new “many-core” parallel-computing applications. Join James as he illustrates the profiler, profiling-options, and concurrency visualization techniques.

Check-out the following additional resources:
- The MSDN Parallel Computing Dev-Center
- Visual Studio 2010 on Learning Center
- Download Visual Studio 2010 beta2
- Hazim Shafi’s Blog on Windows Parallel Performance Tools

Rico Mariani: Inside Visual Studio Beta 2 – Performance and Reliability

October 20, 09 //

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I caught up with the great Rico Mariani, Visual Studio’s Chief Software Architect, after his keynote at a VS partner conference held on the Microsoft campus. He tells us all about the improvements in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. Rico and team have taken the performance and reliability of Visual Studio to new levels in this release. Gone are the days of synchronous assembly and COM component reference look-ups (woo hoo!!!). Gone are the long start up times. Gone are roughly 90% of the performance bottlenecks that slowed down the development experience inside the VS2010 Beta 1 IDE. The Visual Studio development team worked their tails off to improve perf and reliability across the board. Tune in to learn about what they did and what they will do prior to RTM. Truly excellent engineering goes on in building 42. Well done, team!

Rico also discusses his final blog post in his VS history series, a 5,000 word up to the minute historical piece. After watching Tina’s great VS documentary series, Rico decided to add his own perspective in a 10 part blog post blitz. Great stuff!

Enjoy.

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