Book Review: High-Performance Windows Store Apps

I recently read Brian Rasmussen’s book High-Performance Windows Store Apps, and I think it’s an excellent companion to my own Writing High-Performance .NET Code.

It’s a good companion because while my book is all about the nitty-gritty details of .NET and how they effect performance, I don’t go too much into things at the UI layer. My perspective is much more systems and servers based, while Brian is coming at this from a UI/XAML focus. Brian covers a bunch of topics in a very good way.

The title specifically mentions “Windows Store” apps, but the principles and techniques described in here apply to any desktop/UI application, not just the types you see typically on tablets or phones. It’s worthwhile even if you develop just desktop apps.

Particular things I liked:

  • Chapter 3 – Designing for Performance – It presents a number of interesting performance scenarios, many of which aren’t obvious if you’re new to the new world of multi-device, cloud-connected apps we’re in. The discussion on resource management and prioritization was good too.
  • Chapter 4 – Instrumentation – A very good walkthrough of Event Tracing for Windows, which is what every developer needs to know these days, for tracking app events for performance, debugging, or just plain logging. Lots of good stuff here, and critical for all performance analyses these days.
  • Chapter 5 – Performance testing – Lots of good stuff in here I didn’t know about, particularly around building an automated performance testing environment for UI apps. Automation is critical, and this gives some good examples to get you on your way.

The book used the Windows Performance Recorder for most of its examples. It’s an excellent tutorial on how to make this tool useful to you, without getting bogged down into the complexities.

Overall, highly recommended. There are not very many guides on how to do performance engineering for XAML apps, and Brian writes a great one.

You can follow Brian on Twitter @kodehoved. Check out High-Performance Windows Store Apps at Amazon.