About a month ago I posted an article sharing details on some performance problems we were having with the DotNetKicks site. We were experiencing terrible load times, even close to home, mainly due to how we were serving our content and how our content was generated. Often when a performance problem arises, the first place people look is the database layer. In our case, the database had nothing to do with our performance issues. Hopefully this series will prove helpful to someone trying to track down their own site performance problems. Read the rest of this entry »
Going Faster: Sexy numbers and full post-mortem
Posted: 21st January 2012 by Drew Peterson in Uncategorized2
Going Faster: How not to suck at serving web content
Posted: 21st December 2011 by Drew Peterson in UncategorizedWe’ve been working hard to improve the user experience here at DotNetKicks. We’ve been making lots of little tweaks to the user interface and adding helpful little features, not to mention cutting down on spam, but we missed the biggest problem with user experience. Performance. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s 4 articles recently that Drew and Paul think are worth some discussion. So we’re sending them out for everyone to join in and give their 2 cents worth.
NetBash – An Alternative to Endless Admin Pages in Asp.Net Web Applications
Want to be able to write simple functions to administer your website via a terminal window right on your website? NetBash is for you.
SpecsFor.com Launched, SpecsFor 2.2 Released!
New features and a new website added to this light-weight BDD framework.
Return Multiple Values from Methods with Tuples
Using Tuples in DotNet, you can have a function return multiple values. Whether or not this is actually a good idea, is the question.
Just because you can test it, doesn’t mean you should
If your goal is to ship code, do you test judiciously or?
See a link you want to discuss send it to us.
Is HTML5 the new kid on the block? Is Flash just an old man telling HTML5 to “get off my lawn”?
Here on this installment of DotNetKicks Jump-In, HTML5 takes on the King of the plugins, Adobe’s Flash. Will HTML5 usurp the throne? Only one way to find out…
Moderators! To your corners! Read the rest of this entry »
Choices, choices, choices. The advantage of having a thriving open-source community in the .Net world is that you have choices…the disadvantage is that you have to actually make them. Selecting a unit-testing framework is an important step, and can have far-reaching effects across your organization and over the lifetime of your products. Complicating things further, you must also decide whether you want to trust an open-source solution, or go with what Microsoft offers out-of-the-box. Given that Microsoft only provides one solution for unit testing, MSTest is our candidate there. In the open-source world, NUnit is the incumbent candidate.
MSTest’s greatest strength is in who created it. Microsoft’s offering of a complete end-to-end solution for product development, testing, deployment, and source control is a boon to developers. Writing applications in .Net means paying the Microsoft tax up-front, so why not keep it all integrated in the same product suite and offer developers a superior experience? Getting up and running in MSTest is as simple as Add -> New Test Project. No other solution provides that level of simplicity, and no other solution can guarantee that they can support future versions of the .Net runtime and Visual Studio.
I don’t feel that one killer feature, or one strength, should be enough to sway anyone on such an important choice. This is especially so when some would argue that other choices like NUnit are the defacto solution. So what are MSTest’s strengths? Why should I pick it over NUnit? Let’s jump in and find out!