Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Fill factor is an attribute of an index that defines the amount of free space on each page of the index. In an insert-intensive environment, the index pages will eventually split to accommodate additional entries. To avoid or reduce the frequency of page splits, the index should be rebuilt using an appropriate fill factor. So what is the ideal Fill factor? The article " Tips for Rebuilding Indexes " has this suggestion: It depends on the ratio of reads to writes that your application makes to your SQL Server tables. As a rule of thumb, follow these guidelines: * Low Update Tables (100-1 read to write ratio): 100% fill factor * High Update Tables (where writes exceed reads): 50%-70% fill factor * Everything In-Between: 80%-90% fill factor. You may have to experiment to find the optimum fill factor for your particular application. Performance Monitor counters (Performance object/Counter) to watch for determining the ideal Fill factor are: PhysicalDisk - % Disk Read Ti...

This tip applies to Firefox. With ads becoming a good money making proposition for web publishers, it is not uncommon to see some websites sporting loud & distracting ads left, right and centre, sucking up our bandwidth. I especially find the full image ads disturbing & the equivalent of blinding neon lights in a commercial city centre. All you need to do to exterminate these little monsters if you are using Firefox is to place your mouse over the offending image ad, right click & choose "Block images from ". Firefox fills in the website name for you. Once you confirm the website is an ad-serving or a parasitic website & select the option, ad images originating from that website will not show up anymore. If you also want to block iframe ads in all browsers you use with Windows OS, you may find this article helpful.

Key points about the ASP.NET 2.0 Special Folders & specifically App_Code folder , compiled from MSDN docs for easy reference: ASP.NET recognizes certain folder names that you can use for specific types of content & the names of these special folders are reserved. The reserved folder names and the type of files that the folders typically contain are listed below: App_code : Shared application code (.cs, .vb, and .jsl files & also .wsdl and .xsd files) App_globalresources : Common resource files (.resx and .resources files) App_localresources : Localized resource files (.resx and .resources files) App_webreferences : Links to web services (.wsdl, .xsd, .disco and .discomap files) App_data : Local databases for membership, web parts, etc. (.mdf and .xml files) App_browsers : Browser specific settings (.browser files) App_themes : Theme settings (.skin and .css files, as well as image files and generic resources) Bin : Referenced assemblies (.dll files) Except App_Themes, the...

Harish has been doing a refreshing series of articles ( I , II , ...) on UpdatePanel Internals. He shared this info in a group mail. Some of the controls that don’t work within the Update Panel are:- 1. File Upload Control. Here's " why " 2. Web Parts 3. Tree View’s Load on Demand Asynchronous feature 4. Gridview with Async Paging & Sorting Update: I found out from the ASP.NET AJAX official documentation that in addition to these controls, the following controls also are not compatible with UpdatePanel: Menu control DetailsView when its EnableSortingAndPagingCallbacks property is set to true. The default is false Login, PasswordRecovery, ChangePassword, and CreateUserWizard controls whose contents have not been converted to editable templates. The Substitution control. Validation controls, which includes the BaseCompareValidator, BaseValidator, CompareValidator, CustomValidator, RangeValidator, RegularExpressionValidator, RequiredFieldValidator, and Va...