Recently, the West Michigan .NET User Group returned from its August recess with a new location and new meeting time.  We presented Jay Harris and his “Going for Speed” presentation.  This talk, as he put it, “is not about performance testing”, it was a presentation about things to look for when analyzing application performance.

I learned quite a bit, especially in regards to what is integrated into Visual Studio.  The project I am currently engaged in at Meijer Inc is one where performance will be critical.  The Profiler feature especially caught my eye.  The ability to run code in a testing scenario and get, line for line, performance analysis was astounding and I can see many uses for the tool.

Jay comes from a background involving Unit Testing and he has taken that approach with testing for performance as well.  He talks about using Stopwatch to actually time Unit Tests themselves and allow for Assertions if the test exceeds a set time.  This will allow you to measure and know, in an automated fashion, if you application may have performance issues.  I found this very interesting, and while a novel concept, incredibly useful.

The presentation was well received.  We were worried about attendance due to the situation with New Horizons forcing us out of our previous meeting location.  However, our community came through in fine style, with an increase in attendance from previous levels and many new faces.  This was very pleasing and encourages us for the future.

Thanks to Jay Harris for coming out.  Don’t forget GRDevDay is coming up on November 5th, 2011.  We have a good number of sponsors and speakers so now we need the most important thing: attendees.  Head over to GVDevDay.org and sign up today.