Why Performance Is a Feature

This is an exciting time to be a C# developer. Microsoft is in the middle of one of the biggest changes in its history and it is embracing open source software. The ASP.NET and .NET Frameworks have been rebuilt from the ground up so they are componentized, cross platform, and fully open source. Many of the recent improvements have come from the community.

ASP.NET Core 2 and .NET Core 2 embrace other popular open source projects, including Linux. The ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) web application framework, which is part of ASP.NET Core, borrows heavily from Ruby on Rails, and Microsoft is keen on promoting tools, such as Node.js, Grunt, gulp, and Yeoman. Support for React, Redux, and Angular Single Page Apps (SPAs) is also inbuilt. You can write these in TypeScript, which is a statically typed version of JavaScript that is developed by Microsoft.

By reading this book, you will learn how to write high performance software using these new .NET Core technologies. You'll be able to make your web applications responsive to input and scalable to demand.

We'll focus on the latest Core versions of .NET. Yet, many of these techniques also apply to previous versions, and they will be useful for web application development in general (in any language or framework).

Understanding how all of these new frameworks and libraries fit together can be a bit confusing. We'll present the various options available while using the newest technology, guiding you down the path to high-speed success and avoiding performance pitfalls.

After finishing this book, you will understand what problems can occur when web applications are deployed at scale (to distributed infrastructure) and know how to avoid or mitigate these issues. You will gain experience in how to write high performance applications without learning about issues the hard way.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Performance as a feature
• The common classes of performance issues
• Basic hardware knowledge
• Microsoft tools and alternatives
• New .NET naming and compatibility