Whatever Crossed My Mind

In the past I posted 4 blogs posts with ways to optimize your applications using keywords, compiler tricks and approximations. Here is a quick overview of the blog posts: Part 1 – Common sense in application development. Use constants and loop manipulation. Part 2 – Most commonly used keywords in C#: sealed, static, struct, ref, out and unsafe Part 3 – Information about method inlining. Notes on virtual calls, struct arguments and exception handling. Short introduction to loop unrolling. Part 4 – Boxing and unboxing, more on exception handling and string operations Hopefully I will get the time to write some Xbox360 specific optimizations in the near future. I’m busy with the development of Farseer Physics Engine 3.0 at the moment, so it might take some time.

Once upon a time an open source software developer wrote a physics engine for the .net platform. (Let us call him me !) Because of many requests from his users, he targeted Xbox360 as one of the supported platforms. The many users of his free physics engine felt generous and donated a Xbox360 so that he could optimize the physics engine for that platform. Overjoyed by the offer, he accepted and could not wait to see what kind of machine the Xbox360 really was. Nightmare number 1 After paying for a cheap Xbox360 Arcade on  the Internet he waited almost a month before realizing something was wrong. After 5 emails to the retailer and several weeks later, the order was finally canceled and he went on another journey to find a cheap retailer that would provide him with a brand new Xbox360. Nightmare number 2 After his first experience he checked out all the possible references to the new shop as he possible could. Customer comments, google ratings and even the famous E-Mark .