Lars Powers

Lars Powers

Lars has over 12 years of experience designing and implementing solutions on the Microsoft platform. He is the co-author of Visual Basic Programmer's Guide to the .NET Framework Class Library (SAMS Publishing).

Articles Authored

  • Publishing Performance Data From Your .NET Applications

    Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2004 - March/April

    You always want the software you write to have great performance.The reason isn't shocking?users look to software to quickly and efficiently handle their workload. Often times, meeting this performance requirement (whether it is explicit or implied), can be a difficult, even daunting task. Tuning an application to perform at its peak level involves a thorough understanding of the architecture and environment into which you will deploy your application. However, you can't truly begin to optimize an application's performance if you don't understand how to empirically measure that performance. From this perspective, your application must emit enough data to enable real time performance monitoring.

  • GDI+ Drawing Page, Part 1

    Last updated: Wednesday, April 14, 2021

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2003 - May/June

    There was a time, not too long ago, when browser-based user interfaces were considered both the status quo and the Next Great Thing.The demand for Windows Forms-based applications started to dwindle as the developer community fully embraced browser/server applications with their centralized server components and ubiquitous user interfaces. .NET, however, brings a much more powerful library of distributed communication technologies (such as Web services and remoting). As a result, .NET developers are seeing some of these traditionally browser-based applications becoming, more simply, Web-enabled and less tied to a browser. In short, developers can now see a very real business case for building distributed applications on Windows Forms technology.

  • Reflection Part 2: Emit

    Last updated: Thursday, October 9, 2025

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2003 - January/February

    Mike Snell explains Reflection.Emit, a facet of the .NET System.Reflection namespace that lets developers generate new assemblies, modules, types, and MSIL code at run time. The article walks through the practical steps—creating a dynamic assembly, defining a module and type, adding a method, and emitting MSIL with ILGenerator—to build a class and a ReturnSum method without producing high-level source code. Snell then highlights scenarios for runtime code generation and optimization, and shows how dynamic invocation can complement emission. The piece situates Reflection.Emit as a powerful, targeted tool for specialized, performance‑sensitive solutions.

  • ASP.NET Caching Strategies

    Last updated: Sunday, December 7, 2025

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2002 - May/June

    ASP.NET provides developers with the ability to cache dynamically generated pages.This means that it is now possible to cache pages built on posted data and querystrings! For instance, an e-commerce site that generates the same catalog from the database over and over on nearly every user request can now simply cache the catalog pages. Caching saves precious database server CPU cycles and renders pages down to the client much faster. Of course, when the catalog data is updated, the cache can simply refresh itself. Furthermore, developers can define the length of time an item is to be cached, indicate cache dependencies, create cached versions per browser, and indicate where an item should be cached (client, server, proxy, etc.).

  • Top 10 .NET Framework Classes

    Last updated: Monday, December 8, 2025

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2002 - March/April

    Microsoft .NET brings many important advances to the software engineering world.We believe that Windows developers everywhere have reason to celebrate the arrival of .NET, but Visual Basic developers should be the most ecstatic. We get true inheritance, structured exception handling, and a state-of-the-art IDE?but, perhaps the coolest thing .NET provides us as VB developers is the Framework Class Library (FCL). To commemorate the release of .NET, we thought we would present what we consider to be the top ten most useful, utterly awesome (and coolest) classes bundled inside the .NET FCL.