.NET news » Performance

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of improving a website's position in search engines' results using unpaid techniques. The driver behind SEO is that a better (higher) position in the search results will, most likely, lead to more click throughs, increasing the website's visibility, audience, and profit. A previous article here on 4Guys, Search Engine Optimization Enhancements in ASP.NET 4, explored some of ASP.NET 4's new features designed to aid with SEO. Another helpful tool for SEO is Microsoft's SEO Toolkit, a free IIS add-on that you can run from your computer to inspect a local or remote website and identify potential issues that may impact its search engine rankings.

Using Microsoft's SEO Toolkit is simple. Once installed, run it and specify the website you want to analyze. The SEO Toolkit can analyze both local websites or remote ones. After you've specified the URL of the website to analyze, the SEO Toolkit will crawl the site, exploring its pages and identify potential issues that may affect the site's search engine rankings and offer suggestions on how to fix them. This article walks through getting started with the SEO Toolkit, showing how to use it and how to analyze its results and implement its suggestions to help improve your website's search engine placement.

The ASP.NET Web Forms model strives to encapsulate the lower level complexities involved in building a web application. Features like server-side event handlers, the page lifecycle, and view state effectively blur the line between the client and the server, simplify state management, and free the developer from worrying about HTTP, requests and responses, and similar matters. While these facets of the Web Forms model allow for rapid application development and make ASP.NET more accessible to developers with a web application background, their behavior can impact your website's behavior and performance.

View state is perhaps the most important - yet most misunderstood - feature of the Web Forms model. In a nutshell, view state is a technique that automatically persists programmatic changes to the Web controls on a page. By default, this state is serialized into a base-64 encoded string and included as a hidden <input> field in the Web Form. On postback, this state information is returned to the server as part of the POST request, at which point the server can deserialize it and reapply the persisted state to the controls in the control hierarchy. (If this last paragraph made crystal clear sense, great! If not, consider reading my article, Understanding ASP.NET View State, and Dave Reed's article, ViewStateMode in ASP.NET 4, before continuing.)

One potential issue with view state is that it can greatly bloat the size of your web pages. Each new version of ASP.NET seems to include new techniques for managing view state's footprint. ASP.NET 4 adds a new property to all Web controls, ViewStateMode, which allows developers to disable view state for a page by default and then selectively enable it for specific controls. This article reviews existing view state-related properties and then delves into the new ViewStateMode property.

What is the overhead start-up and system performance for .Net, Mono, Java versus C++ native code

Effectively managing user state in web applications can be a tricky balancing act of performance, scalability, maintainability and security. The security consideration is especially evident when you’re managing user state stored on the client. Here's what you need to know about view state security.

I enjoy Game Programming with Directx and I noticed that the most called method through out most of my games is the standard sqrt method in the Math.h and this made me search for faster functions than the standard sqrt. And after some searching I found lots of functions that were much much faster but it's always a compromise between speed and precision. The main purpose of this article is to help people choose the best square-root method that suits their program.

Visual Studio 2010 includes new resource contention profiling features that help detect concurrency contention among threads. We walk through a profiling investigation to demonstrate how you can pinpoint and fix resource contention problems in your code.

SOA makes application scalability easier, but getting the best performance out of your SOA means paying close attention to the details. We’ll give you some tips for coding your app more effectively and using distributed caching to remove data access bottlenecks.

Synchronization is often an expensive operation that can limit the performance of a multithreaded program. Using thread-local data structures instead of data structures shared by the threads can reduce synchronization in certain cases, allowing a program to run faster.

When you're working on a project, you rarely have the time (and sometimes even the desire) to go back and re-factor code to make it either a) perform better, or b) easier to maintain. Further, you don't have the time to regression test your changes, so the common (and most recommended) practice is to "leave well enough alone". I am fortunate to be in a position to perform such optimizations because my schedule is somewhat flexible (I'm the "pioneer") and I'm waiting for the IT folks to resolve a server issue.

This article shows how I implemented something in my code, and should only be used as an example of how to achieve similar results in your own application…

SharePoint is without question a fast-growing platform and Microsoft is making lots of money with it. It’s been around for almost a decade and grew from a small list and document management application into an application development platform on top of ASP.NET using its own API to manage content in the SharePoint Content Database.

Over the years many things have changed – but some haven’t – like – SharePoint still uses a single database table to store ALL items in any SharePoint List. And this brings me straight into the #1 problem I have seen when working with companies that implemented their own solution based on SharePoint…