Ajaxus place on the net

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

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:

read more from the source

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

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:

Check it out here

That is fancy Date picker presented as sliding bar as shown on the picture:

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

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

Once again Microsoft brings some knowledge to the masses 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:

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

Introducing Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX by Dino Esposito ISBN: 9780735624139 * Chapter 1: The AJAX Revolution * Chapter 5: The AJAX Control Toolkit

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

This 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

If you are familiar with Aptana, then you will enjoy this news. Modern web sites and applications use Ajax to create engaging user experiences: the HTML and CSS are set in motion using JavaScript running in the browser and calling back the server. To achieve this, the server needs to prepare the web page appropriately, and to know what to do when the JavaScript calls it. But the server knows nothing about the HTML and CSS DOM, nor how to handle JavaScript data, and you can’t code it in JavaScript…

…Jaxer changes all that. Jaxer is the world’s first true Ajax server. HTML, JavaScript, and CSS are native to Jaxer, as are XMLHttpRequests, JSON, DOM scripting, etc. And as a server it offers access to databases, files, and networking, as well as logging, process management, scalability, security, integration APIs, and extensibility.

Some of the key features that Jaxer provide are:

- Write entire applications or presentation layers in Ajax
- Share validation code on the browser and server
- Full DOM and JavaScript on the server
- Database, file, and socket access from JavaScript
- Seamless communications between browser and server
- Open-source, standards-based, and uses the APIs you already know
- Access existing pages written in other languages like PHP, Java, or Ruby on Rails

Here is an Ajaxians post
Here is Jaxer web site

Brad Abrams just converted the existing Web Site Starter Kit from the VS 2005 web site to use the new dot Net 3.5 framework, LINQ and Ajax extenders. Here is the full source code for that.

Here are some of the key points from his post:

- VS2008 Can Target .NET Framework 2.0
- Upgrade to ASP.NET 3.5 and Take Advantage of Linq
- Ajax Enabling the Site
- Tricking out the site with the Ajax Control Toolkit

read the whole post here