Some meeting notes [Kit George]

All, thought I would post some notes from a recent meeting we had with the WebData team. This is in relation to a Tree class they have created internally in their namespaces, and what we should consider doing with it. The reference to 'our redblack' tree reflects a type you'll see in beta2.

Tree: created by WebData

-          The webdata team has made a tree, which is currently non-public. They wanted to consider whether this should be public, and whether they could use a generic version. Gang explained our current position on SortedDictionary, our generic redblack tree

-          Webdata asserted that our redblack tree does not satisfy their requirements

-          They also stated that some of our collections don’t meet the requirements for particular scenarios for our users. For example, adding a million rows to a SortedList takes around 30 minutes, but a redblack tree takes around 30 seconds. This is huge

-          End issue was: they believe their tree is good for general use, should we not consider having it in the BCL? One of the key things it does is that it has a key, value, and index

o        We have not heard the mass of request for this, but as with all collections, we’ll keep our heads up looking for requests. If the number of requests becomes significant, we’ll consider adding this in a future version

 NOTE: Redblack tree implementation underneath SortedList is all goodnesss for scalability and performance while operating with 100s of 1000s of rows but while operating in the lower end of the spectrum say less than 5000 rows (I don't have the exact perf data here), it would actually add to the overhead than any perf again compared to using simple list. What I'm getting at is there would be a break-even point before which using redblack tree is probbaly worse for your perf. Memory usage would be another point to consider as well.

-          Things we can consider for the future:

o        Do we have to handle duplicates in the class? Do we want to?

o        GC friendliness

o        Do we want to provide positioning (index)

-          Goal for VNext: consider how we can provide a tree, or tree like structure(s) which could meet the needs of the webdata team

Other issues:

-          Fix Dictionary, so that it is single writer safe. This means consumers have to stick locks everywhere to ensure the right thing happens (or, use Hashtable)

- WebData suggestion: Consider making a HybridDictionary<T>, a generic version of HybridDictionary