Last night I presented at the Cleveland .NET SIG on Black Belt ASP.NET Performance Techniques, which is a talk I’ll be giving in a few weeks at Tech:Ed Developers in Orlando. I was asked a couple of weeks ago if I could give a talk in May and I decided to do it so I could practice for TechEd. Since this is a new talk for me (though its material is familiar), I had to put together a new set of demos, and having this user group meeting was a good way to keep me from procrastinating until June to get my demos working. The talk covers performance metrics, load testing, and some performance tips (and shows their relative impact on a realistic application using load testing). It also covers some advanced topics like asynchronous programming techniques, both on the server and via the client.

I think there were about 70 people at the meeting. I flipped through the evaluations afterward and for the most part folks seemed to enjoy the presentation. I had one person note that I spoke too fast, which is fair since I was trying to get through the material quickly since the room was quite hot. Apparently, the building the Microsoft office is housed in (which hosts the meetings) automatically shuts off its A/C at 6pm each evening. So, by 7pm the room full of 70+ heat generating mammals had gotten rather uncomfortably warm. I was able to wrap up my talk by about 7:15 or so, and I was as happy as everyone else to get out of the sauna at that point. I’m not sure if anything can be done about this issue, but it will only be worse in the hotter summer months, I’m sure.

As promised, slides and demos have been posted. Again, both have some rough edges still as this was a practice for TechEd. Look for updated slides and demos after my talk June 5th.

Slides and Demos