Book Name: Performance Turning and Optimizing ASP.NET Applications
Authors: Mr. Jeffrey Hassan and Mr. Kenneth Tu
Publisher: APress
The Review
Chapter 1:
The book starts with basics about performance turning such as Throughput, "Response Time" and "Request bytes out total". This chapter also provides introduction to Windows performance utility and Microsoft Application Center Test utility.
Chapter 2:
This chapter provides thousand feet overview of ASP.NET. This chapter also discusses the performance related issues with Viewstate and how to measure that using the inbuilt ASP.NET tracing feature. This chapter covers the performance impacts of encoding and encrypting the Viewstate using the EnableViewStateMac attribute of the Page directive.
This chapter also provides some vital information about ASP.NET configuration files and how to add app level configuration settings that is custom configuration settings (Very few books address this option.) One cool tip that really like about this chapter is that, "Persisting view state across multiple pages (Page No 37)".
Chapter 3:
This chapter starts with an overview of ADO.NET and teaches how we can improve performance of our application by turning the data access code. This chapter explains the relationship between DataSet's and XML. How the validate a DataSet with an XSD and Typed DataSet.
Chapter 4:
This chapter is a well-written chapter that provides ample amount of information about ASP.NET Session store and compares performance impacts of each of these stores. This chapter not only talks about how to read custom information from the web.config files, this chapter also shows the how to read it in the code (Very cool). Finally this chapter talks about "Choosing the right ASP.NET session store option."
Chapter 5:
This is a very nice chapter that talks about all the aspects of caching including output and data. I wish the authors covered the Shared attribute. One real good thing about this chapter is that, it goes above and beyond the ASP.NET web caching and talks about how to use ISA server for ASP.NET caching (including forward caching and reverse caching)
Chapter 6:
This is a typical web services chapter that teaches how to write web services using ASP.NET engine (including all the web services and web method related CLR attributes).
The later part of the chapter covers the SOAP exceptions and how to raise one, calling web services with asynchronously using server-side and client-side web services behaviors, web services security and web services Vs Remoting. Finally this chapter talks about "Optimizing web services design" with 9 points.
Chapter 7:
This is a very nice chapter that covers all aspects of stress testing and monitoring ASP.NET applications including,
· Concepts behind stress testing including latency, throughput and utilization
· Performance testing approaches such as load/stress testing, scalability and transaction cost analysis
· Best practices for stress testing
· Using the ACT tool.
Chapter 8:
This chapter talks about the debugging and tracing features of ASP.NET applications. This includes types of execution, debugging, tracing, event logging and performance counters.
This book is a welcome addition to the programmer's bookshelf. The only thing that is missing from this book is that, this book had covered hardcore tools such as "Rational Quentify", "Intel's .NET Performance" tools, that would have been a helpful addition.