It's the number of assemblies loaded. It's one good measure, or the amount of memory it takes, the amount of load it takes, the number of instances. There might be .NET applications with more instances, but when you look at the whole package, talking to the CLR team as well, we're definitely up there with complexity and trying to push the boundaries of what's possible.

I want people to come away with an expanded vision of what's possible with managed code. A lot of people, when they think managed code they're thinking of smaller apps, LoB apps, and certainly you're seeing it. .NET is creeping into the operating system in more mainstream ways. From Windows Store you can download tons of things that are all .NET. But when you're thinking very large enterprise server applications a lot of people haven't considered .NET. And there's a lot of good reasons they should. There's been a bias traditionally against .NET, and to some extent Java, of performance. If you want real good performance you go C, C++, and stay as close to the metal as possible. And I want to change that perception.

I usually compare against things like C++ because that's where we came from. Microsoft was all C, all C++, and the back-ends of our online tools were all C++. A lot of that has changed, not all of it of course. The big driving force in development in general today is agility, and balancing that with performance is one of the key problems. We have realized enormous agility gains by moving to a managed language. There's less time spent debugging, there's less time with live site issues because you don't have stupid crashes. All of that stuff goes away to a large extent and you can focus more on the performance. You have to do performance engineering anyway with C++. But now there's a lot less of just keeping the process running with managed code. People are more familiar with managed code just from a developer standpoint. This app is a platform for other developers and so making that easy for other people it was a big goal of ours and .NET just shines at that kind of thing. The APIs are easier, it's easier to plug into the .NET Framework than other arbitrary frameworks. I can't speak about Java. I know Java has a lot of the same advantages. But when I compare with legacy languages, there's a big, big advantage.

I want them to walk away with two big things. First, is this idea that I was just talking about, that they can do large complex projects with .NET, and that they can do more than get away with it. They can thrive in it. They can be better than they otherwise would have been because there's a lot of ways to make it achieve their goals as far as performance goes, and agility and all the other things they have to balance. Also, if they do decide to go with .NET or they are working in .NET already and they want to improve their performance, here are some big gotchas that you're going to have to know about, you have to learn in detail about these areas. And you have to master these areas. You can't just walk into any platform and expect to get everything for free. You want to be engineers? Well, here are the engineering problems that are specific to .NET and how you can handle them and overcome them.