ASP.NET

MSDN Webcast: Knee-Jerk Reactions to Proactive Solutions: Improved SharePoint Performance

dbottjer — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:34:18 GMT

What:	MSDN Webcast: Knee-Jerk Reactions to Proactive Solutions: Improved SharePoint Performance Attend this webcast to learn one dozen easy-to-implement performance tips for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. We discuss a wide range of topics from adjusting out-of-the-box settings to identifying memory leaks in custom code. We also describe several ways to proactively improve the user experience and squeeze more performance out of a SharePoint Server farm. Anyone currently designing a SharePoint Server implementation can benefit from this webcast.
When:	Friday, July 10, 2009 12:00 PM
Where:	MSDN Web Cast Live Meeting

Technorati Tags: Presentation,SharePoint Performance,MSDN Web Cast,ASP.NET MVP

Why Silverlight?

Dennis Bottjer — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 09:56:11 GMT

Why Silverlight? What is Silverlight?

Version 3 of Microsoft Silverlight is on the horizon and there are still some misconceptions regarding why Silverlight exists. Before answering the “Why Silverlight” question we need to understand what Silverlight is. Silverlight, is often compared to Flash because of its vector graphics and animation capabilities. However, Silverlight also provides access to a subset of .NET Framework Base Classes. So this means that complete applications can be developed using Silverlight, with various concerns separated into layers.

Silverlight Provides:

Compiled Language Support (VB.NET, C#, etc.)
IDE Debugging
SEO – Deep Link Formatting
Out-of-Browser Support
- Offline API
- Sandbox

Silverlight would be a good fit for teams building rich internet application on ASP.NET Platform with experience using Visual Studio and writing .NET Code.

Summary

Consider Silverlight if your team already leverage ASP.NET and/or Visual Studio

Consider Silverlight for added Search Engine Optimization Value

Consider Silverlight to build a layered rich internet application.

Additional Information:

Follow me on twitter @dbottjer.

Resources:

Silverlight Frequently Asked Questions

Microsoft Official Silverlight

Technorati Tags: Silverlight,Rich Internet Application

Automated Web Testing with Visual Studio 2008

dbottjer — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 06:32:03 GMT

Tulsa Developers User Group | Automated Web Testing with Visual Studio 2008 (Review)

Corey Roth presented tonight on automated web testing with Visual Studio 2008 at the Tulsa Developers User Group. Visual Studio can be used to record an action such as logging into a web application. Alternatively, users can inspect screen values for specific results. The test would pass if the expect value is present and fail if the value is missing. Visual Studio must be installed to execute the tests.

A tests project actually generates .NET Code (C# or VB.NET). The tool can also be used to show raw header information and cookies. One drawback is that only Internet Explorer is supported.

Additional Information:

Follow me on twitter @dbottjer

Technorati Tags: Web Automated Tested,Tulsa Developers User Group

ASP.NET MVP Again on April Fools… No Joke!

Dennis Bottjer — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:28:00 GMT

I just received notification that I am now a three time Microsoft ASP.NET MVP.

Dear Dennis Bottjer,

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2009 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others.

Also in this email:

About your MVP Award Gift
How to access http://www.mvpaward.com to get your technical subscription benefits
Your MVP Identification Number
MVP Award Program Code of Conduct
The Microsoft MVP Award provides us the unique opportunity to celebrate and honor your significant contributions and say "Thank you for your technical leadership."

Toby Richards
General Manager
Community Support Services

Special Thanks:

My Wife Carrie, Daughter Kate, Mom & Dad, Mom and Dad R. and Extended Family (Everyone without a blog that I know and love. :-) )

Suzanna Moran – MVP Lead

Joe Healy – Microsoft DE

Chris Koenig – Microsoft DE

Shawn Weisfeld – C# MVP

Steve Walker – Microsoft MCS

David Walker – Fellow Tulsa MVP

Colin Cole – Microsoft MCS

SpringPoint Coworkers

Andrew Connell (WCM Guru)

The SharePoint Cowboy Eric Shupps

Shari Alexander - Presentation Coach

Michael Lotter – Founder SharePoint Saturday

Becky Isserman – KC Office Geeks

Joel Oleson – SharePoint Consultant

Roy Ashbrook – Friend and Colleague

David Strommer – Friend and Colleague

David McCollough – Friend and Colleague

Chris Barba – Friend and Colleague

The Tulsa .NET and Florida .NET Communities

Technorati Tags: MVP 2009,ASP.NET MVP

Introducing David McCollough's Blog

dbottjer — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 21:14:41 GMT

My friend and coworker at SpringPoint David McCoullough is blogging. David is a talent ASP.NET developer who has attacked SharePoint development with a ferocious passion. Welcome to the BlogoSphere David!

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,David McCoullough,SpringPoint,ASP.NET

Disposing of SharePoint Objects

dbottjer — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 09:09:00 GMT

The .NET Framework allows developers to write managed code. The term managed refers to how memory is handled by a computer system. For example, C/C++ code is commonly known as unmanaged because developers must allocate and de-allocate memory. In contrast, the .NET Framework provide a mechanism known as the Garbage Collector (GC) to de-allocate or collect object no longer in use.

I have found it particularly helpful to consider SharePoint a very large ASP.NET Application. If you can visualize SharePoint as an ASP.NET application it becomes familiar and relatable. If you begin to deconstruct SharePoint you will notice that it is comprised of Active Server Pages (ASPX), Master Pages, Style Sheets (CSS), User Controls (ASCX), Server Controls, Web Services (ASMX), Handlers, etc. All these artifacts are common to ASP.NET developers.

SharePoint provides a rich API for developers to program against and extend this large "ASP.NET Application." Two object commonly used in SharePoint development are SPSite and SPWeb. Despite the names of these objects it must be understood that an SPSite object represents a site collection. While an SPWeb object represent a site beneath a site collection. Both of these object are managed wrappers of unmanaged code. Furthermore, both of these object implement IDisposible. So now for the million dollar question... When should you as a developer explicitly dispose of these object? Well, the answer is, it depends.

   1: String title;   2:     3: using(SPSite siteCollection = new SPSite("http://mossdev"))   4: {   5:   using(SPWeb site = siteCollection.OpenWeb())   6:    {   7:        title = site.Title;   8:    }   9: }  

In the example above we created a new SPSite and SPWeb object. We explicitly created a new SPSite object while we called the OpenWeb() method of SPSite to return a new SPWeb Object. Since in effect we created new instances of both object we should dispose of both objects. Note that, wrapping the objects within a using statement will automatically dispose of that object when it is no longer needed. A good example of when not to dispose of an SPSite or SPWeb object is when a reference to an existing object is returned from a method call. For example, the method call SPControl.GetContextSite() will return a reference to an SPSite object we did not create therefore we should not dispose of this particular SPSite object. Disposing of this particular instance will crash current page and possibly the site.

Disposing of SharePoint objects such as SPSite and SPWeb will free both managed and unmanaged resources as soon as possible which will increase system performance and scalability.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint Object Model,SharePoint Object,SPSite,SPWeb,Disposing of SharePoint Objects

ASP.NET Debug=true Performance Considerations

dbottjer — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 13:36:00 GMT

I'm sure, like me, you've seen plenty of production web.config files with debug=true set. Most senior ASP.NET developers will recognize that debug should be set to false for the production build. However, this small detail is often over looked. So what does this setting really do and does it have any significant impact on a production site?

When debug is set to true, the following occurs:

Pages are not batch compiled.
Pages do not time out. When a problem occurs, such as a problem with a Web service call, the Web server may start to queue requests and stop responding.
Additional files are generated in the Temporary ASP.NET Files folder.
The System.Diagnostics.DebuggableAttribute attribute is added to generated code. This causes the CLR to track extra information about generated code, and it also disables certain optimizations.

Source of Information: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998549.aspx

Loosing ASP.NET Session State in IIS6

dbottjer — Wed, 09 May 2007 19:25:00 GMT

Last year we deployed a new underwriting system. Since the Fall of 2006 we have been steadily releasing updates to the system. Supporting the large user-base of this application has required us to improve our debugging and performance monitor skills. For example, we have become huge fans of unit testing and made strides to better understand memory management and profiling. To protect the health of the application we needed to understand the recycling of application pools / worker processes.

Thoughts on Application Pool Recycling and Application Availability explains in detail how IIS6 is designed to gracefully transfer client connections to the new worker process. In general devising a health strategy and recycling application pools is a good idea. It is a bad idea to be overly aggressive in the recycling of Application Pools. For example, recycling an application pool every hour would be very aggressive. If application pool recycling is required that frequently I would profile the application's memory usage to determine how garbage collection is working. Perhaps objects aren't being disposed of in a timely manor. It is always a good idea to create a connection or instantiate an object as late as possible and dispose of them as soon as possible. Furthermore, forced Garbage Collection like the GC Collect method is not recommend b/c it can corrupt Garbage Collection Statistics.

When recycling an application pool for an application that maintains session state, the way in which the session state is maintained should be considered. For example, maintaining In-Process session state will result in a loss of session state when the Application Pool is recycled. As a result users may be forced to login to an application again.

Why do I lose ASP Session State on IIS6 further explains the loss of session state when maintaining state in-process. A better strategy may be to store session state out of process.

Web Services and UTF8Encoded ByteArrays

dbottjer — Tue, 01 May 2007 10:06:00 GMT

Our business partner began reporting all bullet points were being converted to question marks during the archiving of Word Docs. An early hunch that perhaps our FTP component was defaulting to ASCII transfer mode instead of Binary proved incorrect. With this option ruled out we knew our electronic document repository was properly receiving both the control file and the Word Doc. We began to suspect the web service exposed by our application which returns a document and metadata for archiving. We were using a byte array to store, in this case, the word document and write it to the http response stream. However, we were not specifying the encoding type which was our fatal mistake.

1: StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();

   2:  XmlTextWriter xw = new XmlTextWriter(sw);

3:

   4:  // Save Approval Document to Text Writter.

   5:  doc.WriteTo(xw);

6:

   7:  // Added this line to specify encoding and resolve bullet point issue.

   8:  UTF8Encoding encoding = new UTF8Encoding();

9:

  10:  // Convert Approval Document To Byte Array.

  11:  byte[] docAsBytes = encoding.GetBytes(sw.ToString());

12:

  13:  vvDoc.FileBinary = docAsBytes;

XHTMLConformance

dbottjer — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 13:11:00 GMT

xhtmlConformance mode="" /> is new to ASP.NET 2.0 and can be added to the Web.Config to specify the XHTML rendering mode for an ASP.NET Application. Mode can be set to Legacy, Transitional, or Strict. Using the Legacy mode is not recommended if your site uses AJAX. I found setting the mode to transitional particularly useful when trying to persuade DotNetNuke 4.x to output XHTML Transitional Compliant Markup.