VBUG Brighton: How to write crap code in C# with Ben Lamb

Last Thursday evening I helped at another VBUG Brighton meeting, this time with Ben Lamb presenting. The evening was, as usual, split into two halves with pizza and beer at half time. This time, more unusually, we had different subjects from the same speaker for both halves.

Part 1 - How to write crap code in C# - Anti-Patterns for Performance

The annotated slides are available at Ben's website as a PDF

Ben's talk was all about performance and things to think about it to affect it. One of his key phrases was "Don't try this at home" as he deliberately throttled various bits of his demo application - a windows application to analyse the complete works of Shakespeare to find out what the most used words are (the most used word is Should should you be interested)

One of the key points I took away is the need to start with some expectations - what sort of performance time is acceptable? Without this it is impossilble to work out whether you're succeeding or not.

Part 2 - "Things I heard at PDC"

Ben was at PDC in October and so presented us the things he'd heard about that he thought we might be interested in. A quick look at the website shows me that there are videos of some of the sessions which may prove useful.

This was a really useful session, providing a great overview of some of the blog posts, and twitter comments I read whilst the conference was going on.

So, in summary, another great VBUG Brighton evening, with a good number of people.