I must say that I am impressed with the performance of .NET Framework 2.0. I wrote a Media Library that if given a folder will iterate through all the directories and add all the files to a DataSet with various tables. I have a table called “Audio” for all audio files (i.e. MP3, OGG, etc) and a table called Video for the various video files. On the audio side I read in the MP3 tags, all version from 1.0 to 2.4.
First, the way I wrote my algorithm is obviously good, since compared to other popular media players out there, it is very fast. Reading 1100 MP3's off a network drive and reading all the ID3 tag info was the test I was shooting for... I tested Winamp, Windows Media Player 9.0, and others.
Windows Media Player 9.0 took 2 minutes. Winamp tool about 1 minute and 45 seconds. My media library did it in 38 seconds.
I used C# with a combination of FileStream and MemoryStream. I also used a DataSet for storing with a combination of Generic Lists of type string. To compare, this took anywhere from 50 seconds up to a minute with .NET Framework 1.1. One major place that helped was the performance increase of the System.Xml namespace. MS did some great work tuning it this time around.
I am sure most of you using have seen other areas where performance has increased and those of you who have not, I am sure you will be pleased when you port your code over.