I read a great article about performance and scalability. Some of the issues there were helped me a lot and the rest were sharpen my knowledge.

So, if you are an ASP.NET developer (beginner or senior), It is recommended for you to read that one by Omar Al Zabir at the codeproject site here.

Some if the things that he talks about are: ASP.NET pipeline optimization, Things you must do for ASP.NET before going live, Caching AJAX calls on browse and more...

Worth a reading...

I want to introduce you (if you not familiar with that) a term called: Startup Weekend. This term is well known and take place every year in US and Europe. Generally, this is an event that gathers around a bunch of 'people' that comes from the hi-tech community: software developers, graphic designers, UI specialists, product managers and more and more....

There is one goal: sit around, think about an idea of a tech project (web site, desktop application whatever...), design it properly - functionality and technologically and finally develop it in order to create a great product at the end of the weekend.

Some more details: this event is being produced by Erez Eden and Dan Rimon and will take place between 3 to 5 in April 2008 at Netwise offices.

So, if you're a software geek (like me ;)) and this idea interest you, you are welcome, I'll going to be there, you can count on it... ;)

More details at: startupweekendisrael.ning.com

See you there...

I read a great article regarding of how to optimize the performance of queries (that you or your DBA had written) in SQL Server 2005.

I doesn't matter if your server is 'strong', or if your object oriented code is perfect or even if you're using tools to maintain good performance to the customer, in the bottom line, if you are handling and working with a BIG amount of records in your database, those list of things are worthless if you database SQL queries are being written bad.

The following article outlines some good points and issues regarding this problem and maybe will help you to solve these problems and to maintain good performance.

Is Google is so kind or what? One more great tool and FREE of course that leashed by Google is the Google Chart API.

By their introduction, The Google Chart API returns a PNG-format image in response to a URL. Several types of image can be generated: line, bar, and pie charts for example. For each image type you can specify attributes such as size, colors, and labels.

If you want to generate charts, graphs, pies etc. this is a great tool for you - the web developer. This tool gives a good fight to all other charts generator like .NET Charting for example and other unwanted ActiveXs modules that need to be installed on the client (we always want to avoid this action - at least me), because it is FREE and also because it is Google.

So I already generated myself:

You can find it here.

While search some interesting and innovating technological stuff on the web, I bumped into 2 articles regarding performance comparison between the classic .NET Remoting (published by Microsoft some years ago) and between WCF technology that ships as part of the .NET Framework 3.0.

The first one has being published by Marcin Celej that claims that: "Sending DataSet with .NET Remoting is faster (in any of cases I tested) than sending it with WCF".

On the other hand, MSDN published also a comparison article, and the evidences were other than the above ones: "When migrating distributed applications written with ... .NET Remoting to WCF, the performance is at least comparable to the other existing Microsoft distributed communication technologies ... WCF is ... approximately 25% faster than .NET Remoting".

Graphs and schemes were published to illustrate the great findings by each one of them.

I am a fan of Microsoft technologies - I admit it, but this issue sounds interesting and worth testing not? What do you think about it?

First a small introduction to the HTML 5 introduction; If you are wondering why I didn't published during the last 2 weeks, the reason is a great vacation in New York - in one simple word - Insane. (pics will be delivered on the following days).

Now to our topic - HTML 5. We all used to (and still) work and know greatly HTML 4 - which actually is exists something like a decade, but HTML 5 is stands in front of us (but is still to come - the work is still on progress according W3C) and comes to simplify our life (as client developers - side by side to the server hard work of course).

Indeed, HTML 5 will going to introduce a whole new set of elements that will make out lives to much more easier, also based on the fundamentals of HTML 4. The main innovations comes to replace the HTML 4 basic elements as DIV for an instance (which is one of the most used elements) with simplify elements that will use to represent the purpose of each one of them, like header, footer, section etc. - each one of then is a new well known element in the new language. A page rendered with HTML 5 could be shown like the following code snippet:

<body> 
   <header>...</header> 
   <nav>...</nav> 
   <article> 
      <section> ... </section> 
   </article> 
   <aside>...</aside> 
   <footer>...</footer>
</body>

One of the new innovations is the language definition. It means that HTML 5 is being defined in terms of the Document Object Model (DOM) as a tree representation that will be interpreted by the browser. This definition came from the idea of separating the language itself from its syntax, which can be defined independently.

As we know from previous HTML formats (HTML 4), there are 2 kinds of syntaxes: the HTML itself which is serialized as plain HTML or XHTML which is serialized as XML.

The coin has two sides - each holds its benefits (you also aware of it right? ;)).

The benefits of using HTML 5 (which based on the familiar HTML) are the compatible of existing browsers and the second thing is the acquaintance of it by the authors (in our case - people like me and you!).

On other hand, using XHTML 5 will encourages authors to write well-formed markup, which some authors may find easier to maintain and Integrates directly with other XML vocabularies.

This is still under consideration, so we have to wait to the decision...

Some more tutorials and information regarding HTML 5 you can find in the W3C site here.

I got a recommendation from my friend about great Israeli Jazz band. This band is called: thirdworldlove and i think that is one of the finest original materials bands that I've heard in the last year.

So if you're Jazz lovers/fans or even not, I recommend you about them.

Almost forget one more great thing, you can listen to their materials here just FREE.

Enjoy...

I Read very nice post that has written by Matt Berseth regarding debugging asp.net AJAX applications. In his post he examples  a tool that has been written by the YUI project team has developed and compares it to the Trace Console AjaxControlToolkit Control that belongs to Microsoft.

If you are a asp.net developer that uses AJAX extensions or even not, this post can help you debugging AJAX events and actions.

You can read it here.

The reason I published this post is because I didn't find any result when googling the error description and solved it myself at last.

If you're asp.net developers you probably know the ObjectDataSource object, which represents a business object that provides data to data-bound controls in multi-tier Web application architectures.

I like this object, most of the time this object can solve you all the annoying steps logic of calling the BL/DAL object in order to retrieve the data and populate the wanted presentation control.

On one of my working on website's pages (which is quite complex one that knows to list data from several sources and procedures), I am using such of object as a data source in the main GridView that renders a list of records. In order to interact with each different select method I had to set every time the SelectMethod property and it's specific parameters in the code-behind. Until now everything is just fine...

It seems that working this way affects the other postback events on the page, (because after event postback, the OnInit and OnLoad events are being called first and just after it the event handler itself is being called), here my page was crashed and gave this error message: "The Select operation is not supported by ObjectDataSource '<objectdatasource_id>' unless the SelectMethod is specified."

This error caused because the page expected the SelectMethod property to be initialized between the OnInit and OnLoad methods and just after it the rest of the events.

The resolution is quite easy in this case;

First, you need to remove the ObjectDataSourceID property definition from the control properties' definitions layout in the control source and set the DataSource for the control to the desired one in the OnInit method. After it, in the OnPreRender method call the control's DataBind method in order to bind the data source. This last action will allow to any event to happen and just after it to set up the Control (the GridView in my case) with data.

protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e)
{
   base.OnInit(e);
   MyGridView.DataSource = MyObjectDataSource;
}

protected override void OnPreRender(EventArgs e)
{
   base.OnPreRender(e);
   MyGridView.DataBind();
}

I hope it'll help anyone...