64 bits doesn't come for free

Nothing comes for free. This is obvious but I still see a lot of people thinking that 64 bits architecture is going to solve all their performance problems which is not true. Maoni is explaining this in terms of .NET.

SQL Server and lock escalation

A few weeks ago Kevin Kline gave a talk in Dublin about SQL Server performance and how to make the most of it. The talk was very interesting because Kevin touched a few times on SQL Server internals. The most surprising one was related to how SQL Server escalates locks. Kevin mentioned that if SQL Server has acquired around 4000 locks within a table then it escalates them into a table level lock. What is even more more surprising is the fact that this value is hardcoded. I've tried a few time to prevent SQL Server from escalating locks and I've always failed. Now I know why :)

My .NET goes to other platforms prediction was right

I was right :). I've just seen a channel 9 video with Scott Guthrie talking about how Microsoft ported nearly the whole .NET to Mac OS X and made it possible to host it inside IE, Firefox and Safari. It's just awesome. At last I will be able to write everywhere using my favourite language which of course is C#. A few snippets just in case you are to lazy to watch it:

The ported .NET framework has but is not limited to following features:

• CLR runtime which means that VB.NET guys are not out of the game ;)
• Garbage Collector
• Threading support
• Network stack support
• LINQ
• A little bit trimmed Base Class Library, for example COM interop is gone which makes perfect sense
• The same format of binaries as in full .NET framework
• The same namespaces as in full .NET framwork
• Cross platform process debugging
• Based on .NET 3.5

Scott leads a great team of engineers at Microsoft that seems (thank God) to pay no attention to their Marketing department. All I can say is keep doing this !!!!

Microsoft is going to port .NET to other platforms?

Microsoft is going to announce something very interesting at Mix07. Well at least half of the .NET world has been talking about that for last 2 months. Today in the morning I listened to the Scott Hanselman's podcast and taking into account what I've heard I bet that the announcment will be related to the Silverlight (AKA WPF\E) which is Microsoft framework for building rich Internet applications. It will change the way we perceive Microsoft. What do I mean?  I think they may have decided to port some pieces of .NET to other platforms to enable developers to write C# code instead of JavaScript code in XAML based web applications. Maybe that's my dream only, well we will see.

You are not an ecosystem your are only a part of it

It looks like Microsoft has finally understood that they are only a part of the .NET ecosystem. They used to think that every single .NET piece must come from them which is not obtainable and doesn't bring any value. But recently I've seen a few blog posts (for example Scott Guthrie) and a few podcasts (for example Daniel Simmons) where Microsoft employees freely mentioned OpenSource projects and how they fit into what Microsoft is trying to achieve. At last.

As a performance geek you can't miss this WCF performance comparison

Have a look at this article on MSDN web site. I really like the fact that WCF scales so well.

We won another programming competition - it's getting boring ;)

The Warsaw University Team has won the 31st ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals.