Archives

Archives / 2007 / October

  • Reduce large website build time in Visual Studio 2005

    10 Comments

    When you have a pretty large web site in Visual Studio 2005, the site build time grows dramatically and it becomes very difficult to change code and then hit F5 (or Ctrl+Shift+B) in order to see if the project builds properly or not. In Pageflakes, we have a giant web site. It takes so long to build the site that we generally issue the build command, go to kitchen and make a cup of tea, drink it, come back and see the site still building. Generally when we do this 20 to 30 times per day, we start feeling sick (not because of VS 2005 instead of too much tea).

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  • ASP.NET Ajax Extender for multi-column widget drag & drop

    11 Comments

    My open source Ajax Start Page www.dropthings.com has an ASP.NET Ajax Extender which provides multi-column drag & drop for widgets. It allows reordering of widgets on the same column and also drag & drop between column. It also supports client side notification so that you can call web service and store the position of the widgets behind the scene without (async) postback.

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  • Synchronously execute and get return parameters from Workflow

    6 Comments

    In my DropThings project, I have used Workflows to develop the business layer that run synchronously and do most of the work in the middle-tier. The business layer facade named DashboardFacade has no code but to call different workflows. Each of the workflow serve a particular operation like new user visit, existing user visit, adding a tab, moving a widget from one column to another etc. ASP.NET page calls DashboardFacade for each user action and DashboardFacade inturn calls a workflow to respond to that user action.

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  • Prevent Denial of Service (DOS) attacks in your web application

    14 Comments

    Web services are the most attractive target for hackers because even a pre-school hacker can bring down a server by repeatedly calling a web service which does expensive work. Ajax Start Pages like Pageflakes are the best target for such DOS attack because if you just visit the homepage repeatedly without preserving cookie, every hit is producing a brand new user, new page setup, new widgets and what not. The first visit experience is the most expensive one. Nonetheless, it’s the easiest one to exploit and bring down the site. You can try this yourself. Just write a simple code like this:

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  • Cleanup inactive anonymous users from ASP.NET Membership Tables

    4 Comments

    ASP.NET 2.0 Websites that allow anonymous visit and anonymous user profile have a unique challenge to cleanup unused data which is generated by anonymous users who never come back. Every first visit is creating one anonymous user, page setup, and other user specific content. If the user never comes back, it still remains in the database permanently. It is possible user might come back within a day, or a week or a month. But there’s no guaranty if user will ever come back or not. Generally sticky users are max 30% of the total users who come to most websites. So, you end up with 70% unused data which are never needed. All these requires cleanup, otherwise the database keeps growing uncontrollably and gets slower and slower. This cleanup operation is humongous for busy websites. Think about deleting millions of rows from several tables, one after another while maintaining foreign key constraints. Also the cleanup operation needs to run while the site is running, without hampering site's overall performance. The whole operation results in heavily fragmented index and space in the MDF file. The log file also becomes enormous in order to keep track of the transactions. Hard drives get really hot and start sweating furiously. While the CPU keeps smiling having nothing to do with it, it’s really painful to watch SQL Server go through this every day. Unless you clean up the database and maintain its size under control; you can't keep up with SQL Server’s RAM and Disk IO requirement. 

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  • Make your website faster using Content Delivery Network

    2 Comments

    Every request from a browser goes to your server traveling through the Internet backbones that spans the world. The number of countries, continents, oceans a request has to go through to reach your server, the slower it is. For example, if you have your servers in USA and someone from Australia is browsing your site, each request is literary crossing the planet from one end to the other in order to reach your server and then come back again to the browser. If your site has large number of static files like images, css, javascript; sending request for each of them and downloading them across the world takes significant amount of time. If you could setup a server in Australia and redirect users to your Australian server, then each request would take fraction of the time it takes to reach USA. Not only the network latency will be lower but also the data transfer rate will be faster and thus static content will download a lot faster. This will give significant performance improvement on the user2019s end if your website is rich in static content. Moreover, ISPs provide far greater speed for country wide network compared to the internet because each country generally has handful of connectivity to the Internet backbone that are shared by all ISPs within the country. As a result, users having 4mbps broadband connection will get the full 4mbps speed from servers that are within the same country. But they will get as low as 512kbps from servers which are outside the country. Thus having a server in the same country significantly improves site download speed and responsiveness.

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