Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Microsoft Application Center Test (ACT) is an updated version of Web Application Stress Tool (WAST) , shipped with VS.NET. ACT provides the same basic capabilities as WAST, but is an updated code base user interface. While based on the .net Framework, it is capable of testing a remote site that is delivering content from ANY web based application. Weighty pages can be tuned by taking care of bottlenecks identified after interpreting the ACT results and performance counters .

If your website offers PDF downloads, it pays to optimise those pdf files for faster access . In general, higher the PDF version number, smaller the file. To create the smallest possible PDFs for the Web minimize the number of fonts, bitmapped images, and substitute vector based-graphics instead. Minimize the number and complexity of forms in your PDF document, and avoid the use of multimedia. The "Speed Up Your Site:Web Site Optimization" offers similar practical tips. At its complementary website, excerpts of the book and Web Page Analyzer - a website performance tool are available.

“How big is too big a ViewState?” "The ideal size for a viewstate is around 7 KB ; it is optimal if you can keep it down to 3 KB or so. In any case, the viewstate, no matter its absolute size, should never exceed 30% of the page size." [ Dino ] ViewState is enabled on four levels: machine, application, page, and control. The machine and application levels are controlled by configuration file settings, while the page and control ViewState settings are controlled by properties. Most sites that use ASP.NET will use ViewState in at least portions of the site, so turning it off at the machine or application level often is not feasible. Therefore, ViewState must be handled carefully at the page and control levels .

How To-Protect from Injection Attacks in ASPNET How To-Use Regular Expressions to Constrain Input in ASP.NET How To-Protect from SQL Injection in ASP.NET How To-Prevent Cross-Site Scripting in ASP.NET via SecureCoder & Developer Security MVP Anil John's blog

High memory is when you see that your Aspnet_wp.exe process (Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.0) or W3wp process (IIS 6.0) memory is consistently increasing and is not returning to a comfortable level (under 600 MB in the default 2 GB user memory address space). Quick things to check when you experience high memory levels in ASP.NET - Application set up for debugging? Disable debugging & tracing in web.config on moving app to Production server String concatenation - use System.Text.StringBuilder class Not yet running the .NET Framework 1.1 Service Pack 1 (SP1) ? Install it. Recycle periodically - For some applications, it's a pretty good idea to just restart the worker process every couple of days or so, at a convenient time.