Just a recap of the things that have occurred this year. I have been truly blessed, and I have lot to be thankful for. Just a small part of them here…

Writing High-Performance .NET Code was published!

I spent the first half of the year heads down and working on the book until it was finally published in mid-July.

Since then, I have been amazed at the positive response it has gotten. For more information, you can read more at the book’s site.

One choice review: “It’s engaging, and reads like a technical memoirs of the lessons learned from the genesis of a very large scale .NET service. Readability is great, but the technical content is invaluable…. I personally felt that the chapter on GC alone is easily worth the price of the book and the time to read it….it’s an excellent resource to fully understand what you need to know about GC…. This book does a very good job and breaking down the myths of poor performing managed code, and the optimal strengths managed code has over native…. I gave this book 5 stars for several reasons. First, it delivers on the content and readability the book is selling. The price is also very generous for the content you’re getting.” 5 stars – I. Paradiso

6 Years at Microsoft

I hit 6 years at Microsoft, all in Bing. Still loving it. Google and Facebook seem to get all the press these days, but Microsoft is a truly amazing place to work and I’m looking forward to many more years of great work.

In-Depth Technical Articles

Performance Considerations of Class Design and General Coding in .NET – This is actually Chapter 5 of the book.
Digging Into .NET Object Allocation Fundamentals – Everything you wanted to know about how objects get allocated in .NET, and how to investigate the details yourself.
Digging Into .NET Loop Performance, Bounds-checking, Iteration, and Unrolling – A similarly detailed article on loops and performance. Some very important optimizations in here if you have critical loop performance requirements.

Blog Entries

Some of the highlights of 2014:

Tips for Writing a Programming Book – a very autobiographical account of how I wrote Writing High-Performance .NET Code.
50 Reasons You Should Be Using Bing – Working on Bing’s application tier is my day job, and a wonderful job it is.
5 More Attributes of Highly Effective Programmers – a follow-on to my previous article.
A three-part series about weak references.
Using Windbg to answer implementation questions for yourself (Can a delegate invocation be inlined?) – An example of how to figure out answers for yourself.

Road Trip!

We drove down to northern California and spent a few days among the redwoods forests. Truly amazing.

Looking forward to 2015

There is a lot to look forward to in 2015. I’ll continue to blog. My book should see some new international developments that I’m excited about. More road trips are in order… Things on my list to visit with family around the PNW:

Mt. St. Helens
Leavenworth
Cascade loop
The Olympics
Oregon Coast

Check out my latest book, the essential, in-depth guide to performance for all .NET developers:

Writing High-Performance.NET Code by Ben Watson. Available now in print and as an eBook at:

Amazon
Barnes and Noble
and more, see book site