Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

I feel participating in technical forums is a good way to quiz one’s knowledge. I ran into a nice posting about ASP.NET server tags on ASP.NET Forums recently. Here is a quick reference of all the ASP.NET server tags with relevant links to MSDN: <% %> - Represents an embedded code block that executes during the page's render phase. The code in the block can execute programming statements and call functions in the current page class. <%= %> - Short cut for Response.Write statement. <%# %> - Used with data-binding expressions <%$ %> - The dollar sign ($) indicates to ASP.NET that an expression follows. The expression prefix (<%$ expressionPrefix: expressionValue %> ) defines the type of expression, such as AppSettings, ConnectionStrings, or Resources. Following the colon (:) is the actual expression value that ASP.NET will resolve. <%-- --%> - Used for Server-Side Comments. <%@ %> - Represents a directive block. The ASP.NET page fr...

Steve Souders , Chief Performance Yahoo! has shared his key learnings on improving front-end performance in the book High Performance Web Sites . These are based on his experience leading the Exceptional Performance group at Yahoo!. Excerpts from the book are available at Yahoo! Developer Network. Here's a quick list of his very practical & useful recommendations: Make Fewer HTTP Requests Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to reduce network hops Add an Expires Header to make page components cacheable Gzip page components Put Stylesheets at the Top Put Scripts at the Bottom Avoid CSS Expressions Make JavaScript and CSS External, especially those which are re-used across pages. Reduce DNS Lookups by using Keep-Alive and fewer domains Minify JavaScript with a Compressor . Avoid Redirects Remove Duplicate Scripts Reconfigure or remove ETags Make Ajax Cacheable Related links: Profiling JavaScript With Ajax View Fiddler PowerToy - Part 2: HTTP Performance High Performance DHTML...

In case you don't have the time to read PC World's compilation of The 15 Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2007 , here is the quick list: Windows Vista The High-Def Format War Facebook Beacon Yahoo Apple iPhone The Broadband Industry Voice Over IP Apple "Leopard" OS 10.5 Office 2007 Wireless Carriers Microsoft Zune Internet Security Social Networks Municipal WiMax Amazon Unbox I wish they also came up with a similar compilation on the Tech Wonders of 2007.

AdRotator populates its image and navigation properties in 3 different ways: XML file (for extra security, give it a file name extension like .ads & place it in the App_Data folder because ASP.NET prevents files from that folder from being served to browsers) Database Programmatically If the page that contains the AdRotator control is cached, the AdRotator control automatically performs cache substitution to replace the cached ad with a new one whenever the page is retrieved from the cache. Related links: AdRotator Web Server Control Overview Using the AdRotator Class + Dynamic Image Generation in ASP.NET 2.0 When you have to review a topic & you don't have much time, it helps to have a crisp summary with only the vital details. I plan to put quick references like this post under the new label/tag - " QuickList ". Talking to friends & from my own experience, I have found that organizing key points as a list makes it easy to recall & memorize. No doubt...

There are 5 choices : Direct Access Response.WriteFile Response.BinaryWrite and Response.OutputStream.Write ISAPI Filters Response.TransmitFile (new in ASP.NET 2.0) "..use TransmitFile .. if you plan on serving a file more than once. TransmitFile is very efficient because it basically offloads the file streaming to IIS including potentially causing the file to get cached in the Kernal cache (based on IIS's caching rules)."