Optimization Techniques

[PhilPrice]

Hi everyone,

I'm currently working as a Developer for a firm who do alot of Soft Systems Modeling. They use a program Called MooD which has an ActiveX API - so my job is to write tools that interface with the models via the API and do tasks - such as mapping of multiple ICs onto processes - blah blah blah.

Now thats the background out of the way i would like to know if any one has any great or good optimzation tips, because the API is a bottleneck (as far as i can see - ive ran my program through vbWatch ) and i would like to speed up my code as much as possible!

Each thing in the model has its own unique GUID, i have functions is classes such as MoodConnecter.GetAllObjects() this will return an Array of all the object IDs - I'm wondering would it be better to use a collection? Are they suitably faster as you dont need to size them first - you just fill them up? Are they faster to itterate?

Are there any major do's and don'ts for gaining speed? My program is quite large (about 6000 lines of code, 15 Classes - 10 Forms (most are MDI Children)) - I've done as much as i can as far as i can tell?

So yes generally any help would be great

PS. An another note - is there anyway to sort an Image Combo? The API does not allow for sorting - so its left to the controls to achieve this!

[MartinLiss]

Help has several articles on optimization.