Regardless of what a tool does, it has to feel responsive to the user and report appropriate status information and visual cues to the user when a long-running task is being performed. Performance is a measurement of how well an application handles responsiveness, scalability, memory footprint, or throughput. While some optimizations can be done later on in development, the majority of performance improvements originate from an architecture that is well designed and constructed. It is important to build responsiveness and scalability into your processor- and resource-intensive tools early on in order to achieve optimal performance.

The chapters in Part VI cover ways to investigate and improve performance in a managed environment, where performance can be any process or task that can be measured quantitatively with a stopwatch. Performance testing and optimization has been around since pretty much the beginning of software development, but .NET is a relatively new platform, so there is a learning curve that developers must follow in order to learn the techniques and approaches to improve performance and write efficient code. The chapters in this part will attempt to alleviate most of the burden on developers new and old to the .NET platform who are building performance-critical tools.