Scott,
I would stick to Strings or StringBuilder. There was an excellent
Episode of "The Show" on MSDN a while back that discussed memory allocation
under .Net (maybe CLR Optimisation:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/theshow/episode027/TranscriptText.asp). The gist
is the GC handles allocations that last a short period of time (< 1-2 sec)
very well (more detail in the transcript).
As for Best practices -- as a rule, I use the framwork classes where
possible, since MS can always improve the perfomance of them. If I use char
arrays (or the like), improvements will never occur.
Finally I never optimise without running a profiler first.
Try CompuWare's Community Edition
http://www.compuware.com/products/devpartner/profiler/
Also try the Allocation Profiler from the .NET Dev team
http://www.gotdotnet.com/userarea/keywordsrch.aspx?keyword=allocation%20profiler
Good Luck
Mark Levison
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