Actually, that's a slightly misleading title. You should trust List<T>, but you should also know its limitations. Here is one of the dangers of launching into using new functionality without reading all of the documentation. I've been having trouble because a client application produces thousands of reports. These reports are supposed to be sorted in a particular manner. I've been sorting and sorting in SQL, and going not paying enough attention to test well. Results in production? Not sorted.

So naturally I started properly stepping through the application, inspecting results from SQL and in code. What do I find? That SQL is returning the proper sort order, but then the ordering is getting lost. Why is that?

This article is part of the series An Exercise in Performance Tuning in C#.Net.

After a month-long hiatus — too much work, too fast and furious for posting — I'm back to the last posts in the series on real-world performance tuning. The point of these postings hasn't been to glorify my ability to tune a C# data processing application, but rather to share what I've learned in attempts to do so.

Where to next? Turns out my next steps were false starts, at least insofar as tuning is concerned. Still, there were some lessons (or should be) from these dead ends.