It’s surprising how easily you can bring down a .NET app. We’ll be starting the new year with a bulk load of data into the system we’re building, and now we’re load testing and verifying everything gets processed as expected. We’re fortunate that we have a snapshot of the expected data load, which contains around 70,000 incoming messages. We rely heavily on a separate system providing static data to enrich each message and we want to be sure that system has data for all the entities we’ll be pushing ......
Sometimes you need to switch on behaviour in your code for short period that you want to ensure gets switched back off again afterwards. I had this recently with an app we were performance tuning. We found a hotspot with our EF code where we were adding a batch of entities to a collection. We were adding a few dozen new entities, with some new nested entities of their own, and it was running slowly, compared to the rest of the stack. There are two flags you can switch off in DbContext.Configuration ......
Helper method for checking unit testing that an exception is thrown, with the correct error message
Note of caution if you're using Task.Factory.StartNew() in WCF services and relying on your generic error handler to catch exceptions
Heartbeat: a new github project for monitoring long-running processes by logging pulses to a database table
Call into VS 2010's TransformXml MSBuild task to generate separate config files for all your deployment environments
Cut execution times by up to 90%...
Using the dynamic keyword and DynamicObject to replace thin application layers