this.ToString()

Performance...Performance...Performance

2012-01-14T13:31:00.000-08:00

As I was reflecting what went wrong in our latest system, I encountered the following post that summarize the root cause of performance anti-patterns pretty well and reflects everything that we have done wrong.

http://www.techspot.co.in/2012/01/application-performance-and.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FdTNY+%28Tech+Spot%29

The anti-patterns themselves does not struck me as anything eye opening, but the summary at the end really feels like what I would have been written as part of my retrospective.

Some of the common reasons

Lack of design standards and reviews processes – even if these exists, the delivery pressure is leading to skipping these processes
Team members inexperience or narrow view leads to every programmer only looking at their module and nobody is looking at the overall application performance
Continuous Integration(CI) tools not integrated with compliance check tools like PMD, Checkstyle, FindBugs etc
No focus on profiling of the application on regular basis during the code construction phase
Not evaluating the results from the Load tests to decipher and fix the underlying issue (blaming the poor infrastructure setup)

Idle timeout for named pipe binding

2007-12-01T11:54:00.000-08:00

Named pipes use connection pooling. The default IdleTimeout on a connection in the pool is 2 minutes causing premature channel death.

You can control the idletimeout by creating custombinding from NetNamedPipeBinding.

NetNamedPipeBinding netNamedPipeBinding = new NetNamedPipeBinding();
CustomBinding pipeBinding = new CustomBinding(netNamedPipeBinding);
pipeBinding.Elements.Find<NamedPipeTransportBindingElement>().ConnectionPoolSettings.IdleTimeout = TimeSpan.FromMinutes(5);

WCF links

2007-12-01T10:54:00.000-08:00

WCF Streaming over http
http://kjellsj.blogspot.com/2007/02/wcf-streaming-upload-files-over-http.html

listenBacklog and maxConcurrentCalls
http://weblogs.asp.net/jclarknet/archive/2007/06/21/a-lesson-learned-about-concurrent-calls-and-wcf-binding-config.aspx

WCF Links

2007-11-08T01:06:00.000-08:00

Hosting WCF Services in ASP.NET - The Survival Guide
http://www.leastprivilege.com/HostingWCFServicesInASPNETTheSurvivalGuide.aspx

Useful .NET utilities

2007-11-04T20:42:00.000-08:00

Reflector
http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/

Run your Unit test from VS
http://www.testdriven.net/

NUnit on steroids
http://www.mbunit.com/

Automate your summary doc
http://www.roland-weigelt.de/ghostdoc/

Code snippets ala flikr
http://www.codekeep.net/

If you do lots of Win32 calls
http://www.pinvoke.net/

Code coverage
http://www.ncover.org/

Copy your source as HTML for publishing
http://www.jtleigh.com/people/colin/software/CopySourceAsHtml/

Web deployment project version confusion

2006-07-28T10:23:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we submitted a couple of wasted hours on an older version of wdproj without ever realizing that ASP.NET team has 2 different versions.

The most current version is 6.xx and can be downloaded from:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/reference/infrastructure/wdp/

While the older version, version 5.xx is at:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnaspp/html/web_deployment_projects.asp

The problem with the older version is that it ocassionally refused to build all referenced projects, causing the build to have to be performed at the .sln level instead of .wdproj level.

I wish I have seen this somewhere and saved myself a couple of hours. :-)

Show modal browser window

2005-11-08T16:46:00.000-08:00

Ever need to show a modal dialog of a browser window? Notice that this script will only work for IE 5 and up.

// IE 5 and up
if (window.showModalDialog) {
window.showModalDialog(url, args, features);
}

// IE 6
if (window.showModelessDialog) {
window.showModelessDialog(url, args, features);
}

For more info, see http://www.webreference.com/js/tutorial1/dialog.html

Javascript window handling

2005-11-08T16:19:00.000-08:00

I have a browser popup window that shows a formatted print layout for a content from other window. When this popup shows, then the browser's Print dialog is shown. I am having trouble that I cannot close the popup browser after the user close the Print dialog causing the user to have to close it manually. ( I know this doesn't sound too bad)

The combination of:

<script language="javascript">
window.print();
window.close();
</script>

just doesn't do anything.

I found the way to automatically close this window by hooking into the onload event of the window itself. The code is like:

<body onload="window.close();">
.
.
.
<script language="javascript">
window.print();
</script>
.
.

Works like a charm.

A very good rundown on Unicode

2005-11-07T16:28:00.000-08:00

Joel has a very readable post on Unicode: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

Several interesting links

2005-11-03T22:28:00.000-08:00

Interesting Martin Fowler OOPSLA 2005 post with links: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/OOPSLA2005.html

Want Smalltalk?
http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/FreeBooks.html