TIP: Defragment your VMs and VPCs

I have several VMs (VMWare) and VPCs (MS VPC), and one of them in particular has been performing worse and worse, so I thought it could be good to defragment it.

Now there’s internal fragmentation and there’s external fragmentation (just like indexes in SQL Server :P). The internal fragmentation is handled using the windows defragmentation tool inside the VM or VPC. External fragmentation occurs if you have set your disks to grow incrementally as needed. You could also say that all the space for your virtual disks should be reserved, and if your physical disks were defragmented in the first place, there would be no external fragmentation of your virtual disks. But if you let them grow incrementally, or your physical disk was fragmented when you created the virtual disk, there might be some fragmentation.

So I found this excellent tool from Sysinternals: http://technet.microsoft.com/nb-no/sysinternals/bb897428(en-us).aspx

Now I don’t need to defragment the whole physical disk. I can just defragment one file at a time. Should save me some time :)

How to check if an assembly has been built in DEBUG or RELEASE mode

I found this cool code that checks if an assembly has been built in debug or release mode: http://blogs.msdn.com/jb/archive/2006/06/14/631469.aspx 
It compiles and runs using .NET 1.1, and thats what I used for building it.

I used it on some assemblies in a solution I have, and were somewhat surprised to find that the following assemblies were reported as being debuggable:

• EPiServer.dll (version 4.62)
• log4net.dll
• Microsoft.Web.Services2.dll

This is probably done on purpose (to enable debugging), but it makes me wonder if my applications would run faster if the assemblies were built using Release mode.