Microsoft’s performance specialist Rico Mariani is to be Chief Architect of Visual Studio.

Mariani has earned huge respect for his detailed blog posts on performance issues in .NET. He’s recently posted some fascinating figures on Linq to SQL performance. From a technical point of view, it looks like Visual Studio architecture is in good hands.

Perhaps this also indicates that Microsoft is giving higher priority to performance. That’s needed. Most of my gripes about Windows Vista are performance related. Take the new Event Viewer, for example, just because I used it this morning. It takes 20 seconds to open on my system, during which time it displays “reading log” messages. This never happened with the old event viewer, which opens without any delay. The new one is much prettier, but at what cost? These small delays, repeated n times a day, consume a huge amount of expensive admin time.

That said, it’s puzzling to find a performance guy in charge of architecture. Still, Visual Studio is the first link in a chain that leads eventually to Windows, Office, and most third-party Windows apps. More speed everywhere, please.