Part of the series: Fun with OpenTelemetry .NET I worked with a couple teams last year who both had the same feature request (more or less). Both teams wanted to add some contextual information to the next span to be created, not the current span (Activity.Current). One team was doing this type of custom ORM […]

About a year ago my boss asked me to look into a performance issue on one of our products. What I immediately noticed was there wasn’t really any logging or diagnostics available in the code. The way things were done made answering a basic question like, “Where is all the time going?”, really hard to […]

Part of the series: Fun with OpenTelemetry .NET I’m working with a team that is doing something interesting I haven’t seen before. They use this Google/Edge browser extension call ModHeader to tell their browsers to send a custom header called X-Debug-Trace when it makes requests to our application. What this header does is turn on […]

Part of the series: Fun with OpenTelemetry .NET You’ve hooked up OpenTelemetry .NET into your application and configured an exporter (Jaeger, Zipkin, OpenTelemetryProtocol, etc.) but you’re not seeing any of your data anywhere. You looked around for an exception but there’s nothing. Is this hitting close to home? Don’t worry, it’s not you. This common […]

Part of the series: Logging and Debugging High Throughput ServicesAlso part of the series: Fun with OpenTelemetry .NET Update: The code discussed in this post is now available on GitHub. The logging we have been talking about is great for analysis, but sometimes you want something even easier. Wouldn’t it be great if there was […]

Part of the series: Performance Hacking .NET How many times have you written a foreach statement? Probably too many times to count. How many times have you worried about the performance of that statement? Probably never. That. Changes. Now! Behold these benchmarks: See anything in there that would scream performance issue? Look carefully, I dare […]

Part of the series: Performance Hacking .NET Update: The code discussed in this post is now available on GitHub. Reflection is great. I have used it many times to solve the unsolvable, as I’m sure you have. But it is slow! Isn’t it? I mean… it has to be, right? It’s doing things at runtime […]

.NET isn’t a performance-first platform. It’s a productivity platform! Its goal is to allow us to write a bunch of business logic quickly without having to worry about the micro-details. Your code should just work, and be reliable. For the most part, this is a GOOD thing. My advice is to embrace that you don’t […]

The other day a dev asked the team I’m on for help with a caching issue they were having. They were putting things into the cache, with an expiration time, but it wasn’t refreshing at the expected time. We recently switched our caching from memcached to Redis so we just assumed this was a bug […]

Part of the series: Logging and Debugging High Throughput Services You can get by with log files. Supporting our payment gateway product we did that for years. But as the transaction volume grew, so too did the log volume. We added servers to accommodate the load and new services to drive functionality. Each time it […]