Unrecognized attribute ‘targetFramework’. Note that attribute names are case-sensitive.

Looks like the Website Project Template is not working in Beta2, at least for me, or did they remove it completly? However, so far I wasn’t able to do a pre compilation of my website, I can’t find that feature in Visual Studio 2010.

We run several Web Applications based on ASP.NET and many of them got more than 10 Million Pageviews per Day. So it is really critical to have a good Database Backend. I just want to talk about the direct Data Access, so I leave out all the caching stuff, that is a topic of its own. I tested the DataReader, the DataSet and some of the popular ORM tools. It’s a standard SELECT Query of 10.000 Database Rows. Here’s what I found out regarding performance:

Obviously the fastest way of accessing Data is still the DataReader with about 20-30ms.
The DataSet raises the bar to about 120ms already.
After that we got LINQ with about 210ms.
There’s ADO.NET with a whopping 400ms.
And the slowest ORM Mapper is unfortunately nHibernate 2.1 with around 580ms.

So if you have to develop the Data Access for big Web Applications you should still stick as much as possible to the DataReader, no matter how (un)comfortable it is, at least for the really critical sections.

By the way: Really big sites like Plenty Of Fish or MySpace which are based on ASP.NET are not using Caching at all. We’re talking about more than 1.2 billion page views/month here. It is not used because as soon as the data is put in the cache it’s already expired. Furthermore no components and just very simple structures including if, then and for loops. Obviously a Load Balancer makes very much sense here. You usually exclude a Database which is being used for searching to save load from the main database.

ORM Mappers are sweet, but it’s still critical to use them if your Website might go through the roof sometime.

1. To open Port 21: netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name=”FTP (no SSL)” action=allow protocol=TCP dir=in localport=21
2. To enable passive transfers: netsh advfirewall set global StatefulFtp enable

That’s pretty much it. Enjoy a thin and powerful FTP Client from Microsoft for free.

Check this post for all the updates.

SELECT somefield FROM sometable WHERE somefield = ’somevalue’

In this case ’somevalue’ is used as a literal key value, which also has an index running on it.

So if this query will always return either 0 or 1 rows, then – from an I/O point of view – using SELECT COUNT(*) or using EXISTS will be equally fast.

Why? Unfortunately SQL Server is not shortcutting an index seek if the value is being discovered in an intermediate index level. It also doesn’t shortcut it, if the value is out of range. So we always got a logical read for all index levels.

For the discussion COUNT(*) versus EXISTS, it does not matter whether the index on ’somefield’ is clustered or not. However, the definition of the clustered index (if present) does affect performance. That’s about testing, you need to check out if the clustered on is faster or not. It mainly depends on the key size of the clustered index, the row size and the size of ’somefield’. In theory, the fastest situation would be a clustered “and” nonclustered index on ’somefield’. This will make the nonclustered index on ’somefield’ the most shallow index possible, so the index seek on thisindex will use the least amount of I/O.

Finally handing over a resultset will be more costly than returning a return value.

So I’ve set up some sweet URL Routing rules with Webforms and I have to say it works pretty good so far. However, sooner or later I stumbled upon the first problem. I used an UpdatePanel on a webform which went through the URL Routing mechanism. As soon as I hit the postback button I got the following error:

Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManagerServerErrorException: An unknown error occurred while processing the quest on the server. The status code returned from the server was: 404.

Obviously because the form action attribute didn’t supply the full URL and that is the problem. You can fix it by adding this to your Page_Load:

form1.Action = HttpContext.Current.Request.RawUrl;

I just added it into the MasterPage Page_Load as I’m using URL Routing all over the Page. That’ll fix it.

I’ve also seen this:

if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_ORIGINAL_URL"]))
        {
          form1.Action = Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_ORIGINAL_URL"];
        }

However, that snippet doesn’t work for me, I actually don’t know why. If that’s the case for you, too, just use the RawURL snippet above (without an if block).

When you use these online apps, it’s because you’re saving a lot of time and putting lots of different people on the same page. It will be a natural process for companies to become more webcentric as they notice what the benefits are.

Edit Documents Online, manage multiple users and much more, I highly recommend trying this provider 14 days for free. My experiences are that this is the easiest way to share and manage your files online, everytime and everywhere.

Old .NET Framework Logo:

New .NET Framework Logo:

Side note: There is a pretty interesting discussion going on about the Amazon EC3 W2K3 topic, if you didn’t check out the thread at the AWS forum yet you should have a look at it, check my previous blog post here.

Unfortunately it only runs Windows 2003 Server and SQL Server 2005. Now that we are all happy about Windows 2008, the new IIS7, the new URL Rewriting features and so on.

This really is a pity. I’d really like to use Amazon EC2, but I don’t want to take two steps back in development. Once you worked with IIS7 you don’t want to switch back to the old and clumsy IIS6. Especially URL Rewriting is so nice with IIS7.

There is a thread running on the EC2 Forum, but until now noone from Amazon replied. If you’re registered there you might want to drop a reply, too: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=25660.

UPDATE:

Thanks for all of your feedback. Our intention is to support the widest variety of options for our customers that we can. We are already working to support Windows 2008 in EC2, and anticipate being able to offer it publicly in the early part of next year.

First of all: Don’t write your own CSV Parser! No matter if it’s a C# CSV Import or VB.NET. There are so many libraries, frameworks, etc. – you really don’t have to reinvent the wheel once again. It’s not just about using String.Split(“,”), you need to care for much more nasty stuff. Fortunately other people already went through the headaches for you!

So what to do? Use FileHelpers Library 2.0! Instead of calling array items by writing myarray[3] you can even use e.g. mycart.ID now, isn’t that beautiful? Here’s a little code example:

FileHelperEngine engine = new FileHelperEngine(typeof(AdRow));
    AdRow[] res = engine.ReadFile(filename) as AdRow[];
    foreach (AdRow ar in res)
    {
        Response.Write(ar.CartItem + "<br />");
    }

It won’t get easier than that. I use it in several ASP.NET Projects and best of all: It’s free! Check it out and thanks to Marcos for creating it: FileHelpers 2.0. You will find tons of examples for reading and writing CSV Files.

• Rules-based URL rewriting engine
• Regular expression pattern matching
• Wildcard pattern matching
• Global and distributed rewrite rules
• Access to server variables and http headers
• Various rule actions
• Rewrite maps
• UI for managing rewrite rules
• GUI tool for importing of mod_rewrite rules

Quite comfortable that they even integrated a GUI Tool for importing Apache2 mod_rewrite rules. I’m not sure yet how strong URL Routing is, which first came up with the MVC CTPs and is now available for ASP.NET, too – I didn’t test it yet. For now I will give the new IIS7 Module a first shot as my current projects use URL Rewriting already and I think it’ll be easier to port my existing third-party URL Rewrite Engine to the new IIS7 one. I plan on not touching URL Routing until it reached the final status.

Get it here: IIS7 – using url rewrite module.