Monthly Archives: January 2008

10 ASP.NET Performance and Scalability Secrets

Posted by on January 30, 2008 No comments

Omar AL Zabir had published one of his great posts again. This one is dedicated to ASP.NET performance and scalability secrets. Here are part of his explanation words:

ASP.NET 2.0 has many secrets, when revealed, can give you big performance and scalability boost. For instance, there are secret bottlenecks in Membership and Profile provider which can be solved easily to make authentication and authorization faster. Furthermore, ASP.NET Http pipeline can be tweaked to avoid executing unnecessary code that gets hit on each and every request. Not only that, ASP.NET Worker Process can be pushed to its limit to squeeze out every drop of performance out of it. Page fragment output caching on the browser (not on the server) can save significant amount of download time on repeated visits. On demand UI loading can give your site a fast and smooth feeling. Finally, Content Delivery Networks (CDN) and proper use of HTTP Cache headers can make your website screaming fast when implemented properly. In this article, you will learn these techniques that can give your ASP.NET application a big performance and scalability boost and prepare it to perform well under 10 times to 100 times more traffic.

In that article he will cover:
* ASP.NET Pipeline optimization
* ASP.NET Process configuration optimization
* Things you must do for ASP.NET before going live
* Content Delivery Network
* Caching AJAX calls on browser
* Making best use of Browser Cache
* On demand progressive UI loading for fast smooth experience
* Optimize ASP.NET 2.0 Profile provider
* How to query ASP.NET 2.0 Membership tables without bringing down the site
* Prevent Denial of Service (DOS) attack

Read more here

jQuery Validation Plugin v1.2

Posted by on January 30, 2008 No comments

This handy tool is written by Jörn Zaefferer. He recently updated his version to 1.2 including lots of new features. Couple of days ago I played with it for a while and it was really good experience.
Here are couple of demos:
rb jqueryvalidate rtm jQuery Validation Plugin v1.2
rb jqueryvalidate marketo jQuery Validation Plugin v1.2

read more from the source

A Study of Ajax Performance Issues

Posted by on January 29, 2008 No comments

Quite interesting study from Coach Wei, of Nexaweb and Apache:

Introduction:
Ajax application performance largely depends on the performance of JavaScript execution and browser DOM operations. I’ve heard various people saying various things about Ajax performance. Some people say JavaScript is just too slow. Some people say that the problem is not JavaScript but rather Browser DOM being too slow. Some people would then argue that browser DOM operations are fine. The problem is Internet Explorer that is unbelievably slow.

More specifically, here is a list of Ajax performance issues:
1. Array performance on all browsers in general
2. HTML DOM performance in general
3. Calculating Computed Box Model and Style
4. FireFox: “eval”, Object Creation and “in” Operation
5. “String” Manipulation Performance on IE
6. Safari: “pop” Operation Performance

Check out the whole study here

Something funny – O’Reilly Maker

Posted by on January 28, 2008 No comments

With this tool you can easily create book covers with a template similar to the one used by O’Reilly Press. Yesterday with just few click I have created this one:
alfa Something funny OReilly Maker

Check it out here

Sliding date-picker

Posted by on January 25, 2008 No comments

That is fancy icon smile Sliding date picker Date picker presented as sliding bar as shown on the picture:
sliderscreenie Sliding date picker

This element enables you to pick dates with a simple slider bar. By dragging the bar over the time-line, the dates change instantly. Besides this, when the user decides to manually change the dates, the bar is automatically adjusted to the corresponding dates.

That is what the creators say, for me it looks cool just couple of things.. on IE throws and error when putting the end date before the start date. Then its kinda hard to hit a specific date from the first time. But overall its nifty.

Its based on Prototype, demo is here
Link to Ajaxorized web site is here

Initially there were only a few courses like 70-620 for complicated computer training. Today we have 642-812 as well as 642-642. There are options like 350-030 available too.

HTML 5 Public Draft released

Posted by on January 24, 2008 No comments

It was about time to see some movement on that side. As we notice all the Java Script libraries to evolve few days ago it was published new public draft of HTML 5 as well as a document describing the differences from HTML 4.
Here is an abstract:

This specification defines the 5th major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web, HTML. In this version, new features are introduced to help Web application authors, new elements are introduced based on research into prevailing authoring practices, and special attention has been given to defining clear conformance criteria for user agents in an effort to improve interoperability.

As well as the other abstract:

HTML 5 defines the fifth major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web, HTML. “HTML 5 differences from HTML 4″ describes the differences between HTML 4 and HTML 5 and provides some of the rationale for the changes. This document may not provide accurate information as the HTML 5 specification is still actively in development. When in doubt, always check the HTML 5 specification itself.

It is interesting to read all these new tags comming up as well as all these that will be left. For example all font, center, applet will be left behind as all these can be easily be written with styles.

HTML 5 Public Draft
HTML 5 Differences from HTML 4

Free Microsoft Press e-books!

Posted by on January 24, 2008 2 comments

Once again Microsoft brings some knowledge to the masses icon smile Free Microsoft Press e books! This time its free e-books. All the headings speak for them selfs and with few words these books are MUST HAVE for every developer. Only few chapters are included in pdf’s as you are encouraged to buy them! Here is the content:

ms linq cvr Free Microsoft Press e books!Introducing Microsoft LINQ
by Paolo Pialorsi and Marco Russo

ISBN: 9780735623910

* Chapter 1: LINQ Introduction
* Chapter 2: C# Language Features
* Chapter 3: Visual Basic 9.0 Language Features
* Chapter 4: LINQ Syntax Fundamentals
* Chapter 5: LINQ to ADO.NET
* Chapter 6: LINQ to XML

ms ajax cvr Free Microsoft Press e books!Introducing Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX
by Dino Esposito

ISBN: 9780735624139

* Chapter 1: The AJAX Revolution
* Chapter 5: The AJAX Control Toolkit

ms silverlight cvr Free Microsoft Press e books!Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 1.0
by Laurence Moroney

ISBN: 9780735625396

* Chapter 1: Silverlight and User Experience
* Chapter 5: Programming Silverlight with JavaScript

Log into Microsoft Press home page for more info here

Microsoft to push Silverlight to business users this week

Posted by on January 22, 2008 No comments

logo Microsoft to push Silverlight to business users this weekThis is BIG! This was about to happen sooner or later – Microsoft puts his Silverlight plug-in into the updates section as ‘optional’ update. Mary Jo Foley writes more about that here. Here is a part of her post:

But this week — specifically on January 22 — Microsoft will make its Adobe-Flash-alternative Silverlight available via WSUS, as well as via Microsoft Update (MU). In order to have Silverlight 1.0 pushed to users, admins will need to select it; it will be an optional, not automatic, download.

The Silverlight product family will include installers and updates for the Silverlight browser plug-in for Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, according to the Microsoft Update Product Team blog.

Read the whole post here