Contents tagged with asp.net
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Droptiles: Metro style Live Tiles enabled Web 2.0 Dashboard
Droptiles is an Open Source Windows 8 Start like Metro style Web 2.0 Dashboard. It builds the experience using Tiles. Tiles are mini apps that can fetch data from external sources. Clicking on a tile launches the full app. Apps can be from any existing website to customized website specifically built to fit the Dashboard experience. Droptiles is built almost entirely of HTML, Javascript and CSS and thus highly portable to any platform. The sample project is built using ASP.NET to show some server side integration, like Signup, Login and getting dynamic data from server. But with very little change you can port it to PHP, Ruby, JSP or any other platform. Droptiles is the sequel of my Dropthings, which is the first Open Source Web 2.0 Dashboard.
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Caching WCF javascript proxy on browser
When you use WCF services from Javascript, you have to generate the Javascript proxies by hitting the
Service.svc/js. If you have five WCF services, then it means five javascripts to download. As browsers download javascripts synchronously, one after another, it adds latency to page load and slows down page rendering performance. Moreover, the same WCF service proxy is downloaded from every page, because the generated javascript file is not cached on browser. Here is a solution that will ensure the generated Javascript proxies are cached on browser and when there is a hit on the service, it will respond with HTTP 304 if theService.svcfile has not changed. -
Scaling ASP.NET websites from thousands to millions–LIDNUG
Here’s the recent presentation made on LIDNUG on scaling ASP.NET websites from thousands to millions of users.
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Get Dropthings license by donating to charity
Now you no longer pay me for Dropthings license instead you donate the money to a charity and I will give you the license. In case you don’t know what Dropthings is, it is a Web 2.0 Personalizable Dashboard framework that you can use to build Web 2.0 personalizable websites and enterprise dashboards. It is built using ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery, Silverlight, .NET 3.5, Entity Framework, SQL Server. It is in use in big companies like BT, Intel, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters; many government organizations like State Police, Canada Border Protection etc. Since it is a state of the art .NET 3.5 codebase, it is sometimes used as a starting point for an application with all the best practices already in place in order to build an N-tier web app using popular technologies, design patterns and testing methods. Dropthings helps you build web app utilizing extensive performance and scalability research that I have done to scale websites to millions of users. It also helps you build a codebase that is highly testable. It shows you how to test AJAX applications using automated test tools like WatiN. It has a business layer and a data access layer that is fully unit testable, nearly 100% test coverage and uses Inversion of Control pattern to the fullest.
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MVP Open Day 2011 at Cambridge
Microsoft Research arranged MVP Open Day 2011 at Cambridge on Oct 24, 2011. Beautiful university, made me feel like giving up my job and going back to study. Amazing research work going there, very thought provoking. The session on DNA programming was out of the world. The most surprising thing I learnt that a 10cm long DNA strand can hold 10TB digitally encoded data and cells are thousand times more robust computing system than silicon based chips. Moreover, cells are self-powered, super energy efficient micro processors, hundred years ahead of Intel processors.
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Prevent ASP.NET cookies from being sent on every css, js, image request
ASP.NET generates some large cookies if you are using ASP.NET membership provider. Especially if you are using the Anonymous provider, then a typical site will send the following cookies to every request when a user is logged in, whether the request is to a dynamic page or to any static resource:
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Build truly RESTful API and website using same ASP.NET MVC code
A truly RESTful API means you have unique URLs to uniquely represent entities and collections, and there is no verb/action on the URL. You cannot have URL like /Customers/Create or /Customers/John/Update, /Customers/John/Delete where the action is part of the URL that represents the entity. An URL can only represent the state of an entity, like /Customers/John represents the state of John, a customer, and allow GET, POST, PUT, DELETE on that very URL to perform CRUD operations. Same goes for a collection where /Customers returns list of customers and a POST to that URL adds new customer(s). Usually we create separate controllers to deal with API part of the website but I will show you how you can create both RESTful website and API using the same controller code working over the exact same URL that a browser can use to browse through the website and a client application can perform CRUD operations on the entities.
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Automatic Javascript, CSS versioning to refresh browser cache
When you update javascript or css files that are already cached in users' browsers, most likely many users won’t get that for some time because of the caching at the browser or intermediate proxy(s). You need some way to force browser and proxy(s) to download latest files. There’s no way to do that effectively across all browsers and proxies from the webserver by manipulating cache headers unless you change the file name or you change the URL of the files by introducing some unique query string so that browsers/proxies interpret them as new files. Most web developers use the query string approach and use a version suffix to send the new file to the browser. For example,
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Quick ways to boost performance and scalability of ASP.NET, WCF and Desktop Clients
There are some simple configuration changes that you can make on machine.config and IIS to give your web applications significant performance boost. These are simple harmless changes but makes a lot of difference in terms of scalability. By tweaking system.net changes, you can increase the number of parallel calls that can be made from the services hosted on your servers as well as on desktop computers and thus increase scalability. By changing WCF throttling config you can increase number of simultaneous calls WCF can accept and thus make most use of your hardware power. By changing ASP.NET process model, you can increase number of concurrent requests that can be served by your website. And finally by turning on IIS caching and dynamic compression, you can dramatically increase the page download speed on browsers and and overall responsiveness of your applications.
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Dynamically set WCF Endpoint in Silverlight
When you add a WCF service reference to a Silverlight Application, it generates the ServiceReference.ClientConfig file where the URL of the WCF endpoint is defined. When you add the WCF service reference on a development computer, the endpoint URL is on localhost. But when you deploy the Silverlight client and the WCF service on a production server, the endpoint URL no longer is on localhost instead on some domain. As a result, the Silverlight application fails to call the WCF services. You have to manually change the endpoint URL on the Silverlight config file to match the production URL before deploying live. Now if you are deploying the Silverlight application and the server side WCF service as a distributable application where customer install the service themselves on their own domain then you don’t know what will be the production URL. As a result, you can’t rely on the ServiceReference.ClientConfig. You have to dynamically find out on which domain the Silverlight application is running and what will be the endpoint URL of the WCF service. Here I will show you an approach to dynamically decide the endpoint URL.