Ultra-Fast ASP.NET presents a practical approach to building fast and scalable web sites using ASP.NET and SQL Server. In addition to a wealth of tips, tricks and secrets, you'll find advice and code examples for all tiers of your application, including the client, caching, IIS 7, ASP.NET, threads, session state, SQL Server, Analysis Services, infrastructure and operations. By applying the ultra-fast approach to your projects, youll squeeze every last ounce of performance out of your code and infrastructuregiving your site unrivaled speed.

The approach is mostly prescriptive; rather than drowning you in options, the book presents and explains specific high-impact recommendations and demonstrates them with detailed examples. Using this knowledge, you will soon be building high-performance web sites that scale easily as your site grows.

What youll learn

• A way of thinking about performance issues that will help you obtain real results.
• How to apply key principles that will help you build ultra-fast and ultra-scalable web sites.
• How to use the ultra-fast approach to be fast in multiple dimensions. Youll have not only fast pages but also fast changes, fast fixes, fast deployments and more.
• Techniques that are being used by some of the world's largest web sites.
• How to structure your HTML and CSS to create pages that load ultra-fast.
• Tips for using Silverlight, Ajax and IIS 7 to improve the performance of your site.
• How to use comprehensive caching at all tiers to deliver content faster.
• Why you should avoid traditional session state and how to make the best use of cookies.
• Tips and tricks for optimizing your ASP.NET and SQL Server code for performance and scalability.
• How to use Analysis Services to offload your relational database.
• Why many sites that serve individual pages quickly are not scalable.
• How to avoid common pitfalls that can have an adverse impact on your sites performance, both now and as it grows.
• How to apply an end-to-end systems-based approach to web site performance and scalability, which includes everything from the browser and the network to caching, back-end operations, hardware infrastructure, and your software development process.

Who this book is for


This book will be useful for intermediate to advanced developers and architects who want to improve the performance of their ASP.NET-based web sites. Some knowledge of ASP.NET, SQL Server, and IIS is assumed. Example code is provided in C#. Experienced web developers who have recently moved from Java or PHP to .NET will find lots of valuable and interesting information.

This book will also be useful for non-developers who have a technical interest in what makes a web site fast. In particular, if youre involved with web site operations, testing, or management, you will discover many of the principals and issues that your development teams should be addressing, along with demonstrations that help drive the points home.

Table of Contents

1. Principles and Method
2. Client Performance
3. Caching
4. IIS 7
5. ASP.NET Threads and Sessions
6. Using ASP.NET to Implementand Manage Optimization Techniques
7. Managing ASP.NET Application Policies
8. SQL Server Relational Database
9. SQL Server Analysis Services
10. Infrastructure and Operations
11. Putting It All Together

Customer Reviews & Comments
One of the author's stated goals for this book is "to help remove some of the fog that may be masking the end-to-end vision of the technology and to help you see the beauty and the full potential of ASP.NET and SQL Server." He does an excellent job of doing just that. We all want our web applications to run lean, clean and fast, but how do we best spend our time doing so? You might ask, "Should I spend more time improving my caching strategies? How should I approach it?" or "Should I spend my time trying to optimize IIS's performance? Where do I begin with that?" With so many different ways to approach any given problem, you could spend days or weeks learning all the different ways you MIGHT be able to get your desired results. But if you're like me, after a while you just say, "OK, OK, someone please just tell me the best way to approach this for most situations and I'll tweak it for my needs." That's what you get here. This book is great. It is a collection of best practices, tips and tricks for architecting your web applications to be both ultra-fast AND ultra-scalable. Instead of listing a thousand things you might want to try out to see if it helps, this book just says, "here is a proven approach that works for most situations, most of the time". Thank you! Let's implement it and move on to the next one. But more than just telling you, "Do this, then do that", this book explains the Why's as you go along. This is invaluable as it is how we actually learn and integrate these things into our understanding of the big picture. It is clear that the author has deep and intimate knowledge of the subject. His credentials explain why. He began working with the Internet and writing network-oriented software in the 70's. More recently, he was an architect at the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) in Silicon Valley where he ran two- to three-day architectural design sessions once or twice each week for some of Microsoft's largest and most sophisticated customers. In understanding their issues and helping them architect solutions he saw many of the same questions coming up time and time again. Questions such as: * "How can we make our HTML display faster?" (Chapter 2) * "What's the best way to do caching?" (Chapter 3) * "How can we use IIS to make our site faster?" (Chapter 4) * "How should we handle session state?" (Chapter 5) * "How can we improve our ASP.NET code?" (Chapters 5 to 7) * "Why is our database slow?" (Chapters 8 and 9) * "How can we optimize our infrastructure and operations?" (Chapter 10) * "Where do we start?" (Chapter 11) I'm thrilled someone has finally written a book like this. It really helps a developer learn and understand the end-to-end big picture... not only the How's but, more importantly, the Why's. Kudos Mr. Kiessig.

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