Archives
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Dropthings now available from Microsoft/Web
Dropthings is now available on Microsoft/Web. You can now install it using the Web Platform Installer. I will soon write an article how to make an installer that can install a ASP.NET website, a SQL Server database, setup web.config files, setup directory permissions (eg App_Data) etc. It wasn’t straightforward and I learnt some best practices from the Microsoft/Web team. But for now, go ahead and download the app and build cool sites out of it.
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How to make screencasts in optimized animated GIF for free
I have been using animated GIFs to show short screencasts in my blogs and articles. Animated GIF is supported by all browsers and supports virtually any website in the world where even Flash is blocked. A picture is worth a thousand words, and an animation is worth a thousand multiplied by [frames in animation] words. So, I have been looking for a complete free solution to capturing screencasts and then converting it to animated GIF and then heavily compressing it.
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Production Challenges of ASP.NET Website – recording of my talk
“It works in my PC”, the common dialog from Developers. But on production CPU burns out, disks go crazy, your site stops responding every now and then, you have to frequently recycle application pool, or even restart windows to bring things back to normal for a while.
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Building High Performance Queue in Database for storing Orders, Notifications, Tasks
We have Queues everywhere. There are queues for asynchronously sending notifications like email and SMS in most websites. E-Commerce sites have queues for storing orders, processing and dispatching them. Factory Assembly line automation systems have queues for running tasks in parallel, in a certain order. Queue is a widely used data structure that sometimes have to be created in a database instead of using specialized queue technologies like MSMQ. Running a high performance and highly scalable queue using database technologies is a big challenge and it’s hard to maintain when the queue starts to get millions of rows queued and dequeued per day. Let me show you some common design mistakes made in designing Queue-like tables and how to get maximum performance and scalability from a queue implemented using simple database features.