Scalability

Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2002 06:11:13 -0700 Reply-To: Discussion forum for developers using Windows Forms to build apps and controls <[email protected]> Sender: Discussion forum for developers using Windows Forms to build apps and controls <[email protected]> From: Alan Robbins <[email protected]> Subject: Re: BugList Check Comments: To: Brian Vallelunga <[email protected]> Brian Thanks for the comments/info. I am aware of Microsoft's position on the Tree Control and agree with your comments wholeheartedly! I too had a long affair with the listView control in VB6, it does offer considerable functionality -- but the current app uses a large number of self-join tables to represent information (lots of recursion there) and the tree control fits the data better. With regards to my comments on heap management... Yes .NET is considerably faster than anything I've ever worked with out of Redmond. However... The apps my team builds usually run over a quarter million lines of code. What we've found with .NET is that the bigger the managed heap gets, the longer and longer it takes for objects to be destroyed, because .NET walks the heap looking for references to see if the object can be destroyed. You can get around this IF you have a good mental image of what the heap looks like, have an excellent grasp of "who's using what" and call gc.suppressfinalize(me) -- which says "Don't walk the heap I know what I'm doing". So in the end Microsoft may have figured out a way to reduce memory leaks for the beginning and intermediate folks, and that's real nice, but when you get into the big league enterprise wide large scale application development arena all of this falls apart -- as usual. I have similiar rants about ASP.NET -- Sure, any beginning/intermediate programmer can now create a web application easier than ever, but can they use the tool to write a web site with 50,000 concurrent users? No, they can't, because the whole server side control paradigm falls apart with that kind of load because it's too "sticky". IMHO the big corporate I.T. shops is the market Microsoft wants to crack, because they own the desktop already, but not the computer room. And while .NET is a step in the right direction, it still shows it's desktop development tool heritage. Yes I love .NET and VB.NET and C# -- but our main revenue generating Web Site is written in Cold Fusion, not ASP, and I spent a large part of my day teaching the same old stuff from the C++/assembler days to the younger guys, because they come from the new school where resources & memory are unlimited and you don't have to worry about memory management because ".Net takes care of that for you" (cringe) Alan