Performance Tuning and Optimizing ASP.NET Applications (Paperback)

by Jeffrey Hasan (Author), Kenneth Tu (Author)
Key Phrases: session state management, new string, class members, Visual Studio, Writing Optimized Data Access Code, Writing Optimized Web Services (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
<p>The technical book market today is flooded with a slew of titles on how to build applications with the .NET technology, and many are undoubtedly very good. But the majority of these titles simply take a "how-to" approach on programming with the .NET Framework. They often pay little more than cursory attention to the real-world issues and challenges that developers face. Performance is one of those challenges. </p>

<p>This book is for intermediate to advanced .NET developers who need answers to the hard questions on how to build high-performance ASP.NET applications. Authors Jeffrey Hasan and Kenneth Tu focus on how to make good design decisions for performance. They discuss how to develop applications with performance in mind. And they pay special attention to the tools available to developers to quantify and monitor performance issues and to diagnose performance problems more quickly. </p>

<p>Infused with the authors' collective experiences, gathered from years of building high-performance web applications, this is a book that developers will want to keep on the shelf for a long time.</p>

About the Author
Jeffrey Hasan is the president of Bluestone Partners, Inc., a technology consulting company specializing in enterprise architecture and development using .NET. Bluestone focuses on service-oriented architecture and enterprise integration using web services technology. Jeff has coauthored numerous books on .NET technology, including <i>Performance Tuning and Optimizing ASP.NET Applications</i> and <i>Professional .NET Framework</i>. He holds a master’s degree from Duke University and is a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD).

Kenneth Tu is a developer, architect, and author specializing in Windows and web development using Microsoft technologies, primarily for the financial, telecommunications, and broadband industries. He has extensive experience developing ASP.NET applications and XML web services. Kenneth has a degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California, Irvine.

Product Details

• Paperback: 392 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (March 19, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590590724
• ISBN-13: 978-1590590720
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #760,568 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Two Thumbs Up, April 7, 2003

By	"stephlynn" (New Holland, PA United States) - See all my reviews

If you have some experience developing ASP.NET applications, then you will want to read this book! You don't have to be a super user, you just need to know the basics on how to create an ASP.NET application. Don't get me wrong, this book is also a must read for us developers who have been creating ASP.NET applications for a while too.

Chapter 1, Introducing Performance Tuning and Optimization was very well written and describes the basics of this topic. Chapter 2, Introducing ASP.NET Applications was a little basic for me, but you don't want to skip reading it. I found some very helpful explanations about the reasons for doing things the recommended way that no other author has mentioned. Most books tell you to do it a certain way, but never indicate why. Chapter 3, Writing Optimized Data Access Code, also had some very helpful tips and explanations.

My favorite chapters by far were Chapters 4 (Optimizing Application and Session State Management), 5 (Caching ASP.NET Applications)and 7(Stress Testing and Monitoring ASP.NET Applications). I can't say enough about these chapters. They are a must read for any developer!! The only bad thing I can say is, I wish they would have developed Chapter 7 even more. Or, maybe we can entice them to write a whole book on ACT, a feature that is not mentioned in any other book I have read, and I read a lot.

Chapter 6, Writing Optimized Web Services, was also a great chapter, but it's not one that interests me at this time because I do not have a use for it in my current developing position. However, if you do have a use for Web Services, this is a must read chapter as it gives a great example and shows how users consume it.

I highly recommend this book to any and all developers, even if you are just starting out with ASP.NET. It's a book you will want to keep for referencing during your ASP.NET development.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent ASP.NET Performance Book, June 26, 2003

By A Customer

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book! It was easy to read and was filled with good advice regarding ASP.NET application performance.

My favorite topics included using session state management, writing optimized data access, understanding viewstate and even using Microsoft's ACT!

Most of all, the authors devoted a solid chapter on Stress Testing and Monitoring Performance. I found this to be the most important chapter because it covered the concepts behind analyzing and measuring the performance of your site. This chapter's concepts apply to all other topics in the book.

This book is a must have for ASP.NET developers!

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A welcome addition to the programmers bookshelf, October 27, 2003

By	Srinivasa Sivakumar (Bangalore, India) - See all my reviews

Book Name: Performance Turning and Optimizing ASP.NET Applications
Authors: Mr. Jeffrey Hassan and Mr. Kenneth Tu
Publisher: APress

The Review

Chapter 1:

The book starts with basics about performance turning such as Throughput, "Response Time" and "Request bytes out total". This chapter also provides introduction to Windows performance utility and Microsoft Application Center Test utility.

Chapter 2:

This chapter provides thousand feet overview of ASP.NET. This chapter also discusses the performance related issues with Viewstate and how to measure that using the inbuilt ASP.NET tracing feature. This chapter covers the performance impacts of encoding and encrypting the Viewstate using the EnableViewStateMac attribute of the Page directive.

This chapter also provides some vital information about ASP.NET configuration files and how to add app level configuration settings that is custom configuration settings (Very few books address this option.) One cool tip that really like about this chapter is that, "Persisting view state across multiple pages (Page No 37)".

Chapter 3:

This chapter starts with an overview of ADO.NET and teaches how we can improve performance of our application by turning the data access code. This chapter explains the relationship between DataSet's and XML. How the validate a DataSet with an XSD and Typed DataSet.

Chapter 4:

This chapter is a well-written chapter that provides ample amount of information about ASP.NET Session store and compares performance impacts of each of these stores. This chapter not only talks about how to read custom information from the web.config files, this chapter also shows the how to read it in the code (Very cool). Finally this chapter talks about "Choosing the right ASP.NET session store option."

Chapter 5:

This is a very nice chapter that talks about all the aspects of caching including output and data. I wish the authors covered the Shared attribute. One real good thing about this chapter is that, it goes above and beyond the ASP.NET web caching and talks about how to use ISA server for ASP.NET caching (including forward caching and reverse caching)

Chapter 6:

This is a typical web services chapter that teaches how to write web services using ASP.NET engine (including all the web services and web method related CLR attributes).

The later part of the chapter covers the SOAP exceptions and how to raise one, calling web services with asynchronously using server-side and client-side web services behaviors, web services security and web services Vs Remoting. Finally this chapter talks about "Optimizing web services design" with 9 points.

Chapter 7:

This is a very nice chapter that covers all aspects of stress testing and monitoring ASP.NET applications including,

· Concepts behind stress testing including latency, throughput and utilization
· Performance testing approaches such as load/stress testing, scalability and transaction cost analysis
· Best practices for stress testing
· Using the ACT tool.

Chapter 8:

This chapter talks about the debugging and tracing features of ASP.NET applications. This includes types of execution, debugging, tracing, event logging and performance counters.

This book is a welcome addition to the programmer's bookshelf. The only thing that is missing from this book is that, this book had covered hardcore tools such as "Rational Quentify", "Intel's .NET Performance" tools, that would have been a helpful addition.