I have had the pleasure of spending the last few days improving application performance. Specifically, my job is to improve the 'speed' dimension of the application. In doing this, I've been getting reacquainted with some well used tools: SQL Query Analyzer and dotTrace Profiler. (For those of you familiar with when SQL Query Analyzer was last available under that name, I'm working with a completely functional, happy, SQL Server 2000 installation.) It's been quite a few months since I last did this. Given that not many people get a chance to do performance analysis and improvement on a regular basis, I think that now might be a good time to rehash some common mistakes and the way to fix those mistakes.

I have a sickness. My illness causes me to skip sleep, to skip meals, and to allocate no time to play video games. Occasionally, enablers have given me money to encourage me to indulge in this illness. I have no interest in getting ‘help’. I am an author and I write about technology topics. ...

Tony Baer has an interesting post at http://www.onstrategies.com/blog/?p=251, 'SOA in a Recession?'. The question here is 'what will SOA investments look like during a recession?' Having been a part of the big client server moves of the mid to late 1990s, web deployments of 1997 to the present, and someone who has done training on SOA across the country for Wintellect, I have to say that SOA feels different from the previous two items. For client server, we had to start thinking about our applications differently. Bits of the application lived in different processes on different machines. Here, we had to rearchitect applications to deal with a new security model and to deal with the greater latencies involved in method and database calls.

My blog is back up and running. Expect lots of stuff on WCF, .NET, and other things that interest me.