Dude, where’s my app server?
I’m not doing any more projects without a proper app server! For reasons of various resource vagaries, I have been on two projects now where the server side dev team was inadequate or missing. Thus the client team had to adapt to whatever format the data feeds were available in, and kind of stitch stuff together. The upshot of this is that all kinds of middleware that belongs in the app server gets written in C#. For a trading system, that means that the performance requirements of the C# app become extreme, since you end up drinking from the market data firehose – good for your profiling chops, bad for your nerves… Finally got a good app server in place that can do data compression and feed data at a logical rate (like 10Hz) instead of having to deal with 100s of updates a second. If you find yourself in this position, insist on an app server – even if you have to write it yourself 
May 17th, 2006 at 2:50 pm
Speaking of profilers, what is your experience with those? So far Compuware’s DevPartner Studio 8 appears to be the Cadillac of profilers for .Net 2, but it’s 5-10 times more expensive than competing products and is hard to get an eval for. Free CLR Profiler is only suitable for heap and GC observation. I heard the new profiler in Team System is a decent tool. Thank you!
May 17th, 2006 at 4:12 pm
I have had pretty good success with Rational’s Quantify. I believe it is part of the Purify for .NET suite.
May 18th, 2006 at 3:04 am
The profiler in Team System is decent, but doesnt give the line-by-line breakdowns that the Intel profiler does. Sometimes you really want to know the time at the call site rather than just the method time itself.
May 18th, 2006 at 5:12 pm
Looks like Quantify does not support .Net 2: Visual Studio 2005 is not listed on PurifyPlus’ system requirements page. Evaluation download version is of June 2003.
May 18th, 2006 at 5:52 pm
I haven’t played with yet, but the other stuff from jetbrains has been pretty good:
http://www.jetbrains.com/profiler/
August 1st, 2006 at 10:26 pm
My personal favorite has been the AQTime profiler. The thing does everything in a nice clean interface! It’s helped me solve a ton of headaches!
http://www.automatedqa.com/products/aqtime/index.asp