Tales from a Trading Desk

Noise from an Investment Bank

June 2004 - Posts

TechEd, JavaOne Sessions

I'm confused.  Microsoft lets anyone who is interested see the TechEd 2004 sessions for free, but Sun in its wisdom appear to be charging $99 for the privilege of seeing the JavaOne slides (via the JavaOne Community) - or have I missed something?

Improving Application Performance

The TechEd 2004 sessions are available.  This session talks about performance and the Performance Modelling process.  Mark Russinovich's session also looks interesting.  There are also the 64-bit session and an AMD64 session - the performance figures for the AMD Opteron 1P vs Xeon 3.2GHZ 2P are impressive.  Writing Faster Managed Code session covers a lot of the usual ground; however the final few slides have some interesting data on Longhorn performance expectations.

Update: Looks like you now need a username/password to access the TechEd 2004 sessions :(

Posted: Jun 28 2004, 09:15 AM by mdavey | with 1 comment(s)
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Reflection and WinForm Web Deployment

First MSDN Magazine article in a while that I found interesting - How Microsoft Uses Reflection

A colleague is doing some work in the WinForm web deployment area and kindly provided a list of resources he found useful:

Posted: Jun 24 2004, 10:26 PM by mdavey | with no comments
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Mozilla FireFox
I use both Internet Explorer (IE) and FireFox when surfing the web.  Since I change location/computer a lot I use Yahoo's Toolbar to manage my bookmarks, but it has the downside of only working in IE.  Anyone know of a similar tool that works with FireFox?
Busy Week

Last week was a busy week, mainly due to the fact that I am taking a break during July from my current project. This is what I have been doing:

  • Syncfusion integration
  • Client/Server marshalling improvements
  • Improvements in the codebase ready for .NET 2.0
  • Tagging old/unused functionality with the ObsoleteAttribute ready for removal
  • Adding more unit tests
  • Bug fixes 
Posted: Jun 20 2004, 07:56 PM by mdavey | with no comments
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C# 3.0
Anders Hejlsberg  talk about C# 3.0 (programming data) on Channel9
Posted: Jun 18 2004, 09:20 AM by mdavey | with no comments
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UK .NET Bloggers

I've finally made it onto Tim's list, wonder if I'll ever get onto the MSDN UK list.

Posted: Jun 17 2004, 12:05 PM by mdavey | with 3 comment(s)
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Hyper-threading Performance

Based on this, this and this, we are going to try running one of our .NET applications with hyper-threading disabled, so see if we get any performance improvements.

TraderServer1 having had more tweaks over the past few months, now does a #Gen 2 Collection every 90 seconds :)

Posted: Jun 15 2004, 08:20 AM by mdavey | with no comments
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IntelliJ and VisualGC

So this weekend I managed to find a hour or so to have a quick play with IntelliJ and Sun's heap visualization tool, VisualGC.  IntelliJ isn't bad, but I really don't like the default File Template that they provide for a Singleton class; the code is thread safe but not a 100% singleton, but at least you can go into the File/Settings dialog and correct the template.  The GUI editor that comes with IntelliJ is pretty good, the GUI forms are not Java classes, they are actually XML files.  Once you've build your form, you bind the form to a Java class.

VisualGC from Sun is visually pretty cool.  I only played with it for a short time, but the graph's depicting the various parts of the heap appear initially to look better than what the CLR Profiler from Microsoft's display.  Obviously looking cool doesn't actually mean it provides any better data for performance tuning, and from what I can see, CLR Profiler provides a lot more detailed data than VisualGC.

Posted: Jun 13 2004, 06:32 PM by mdavey | with no comments
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VS.NET Code View
Thanks Ian, I can think of a few places in the code I am working on now where [System.ComponentModel.DesignerCategory("Code")] will be useful
Posted: Jun 12 2004, 12:19 AM by mdavey | with no comments
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