Performance Tuning and Optimizing ASP.Net Applications

This book is superior in many ways to the traditional how-to and language reference guides that you may find at any bookstore. Finally somebody provides solid arguments to support technical decisions that every software developer needs to make during the implementation and design of an ASP.NET system.This material contains in-depth discussions about choosing the best caching technology, data structures, state management and almost every single topic that will help you delivery a fast and scalable application.After reading this book you will be ready to answer any type of performance-related questions to your customers and peers (which is always something nice)My advice is not to wait until you are code complete in order to start thinking about performance. Tackle this issue early in the design phase and you will save tons of hours and money by minimizing tuning efforts on an already optimized architectureStrongly recommended!

APress consistently puts out good books, but even by their high standards this book really stands out. The topics are presented in a very readable, very useful way. Jeffrey Hasan is a consistently good technical writer and speaker. I have found his articles in MSDN Magazine and particularly asp.NET Pro magazine to be very useful, and always very readable. (That's partly why I ended up buying this book).There is a lot of detail here, but I never felt overwhelmed by it. At first glance, some of the topics in this book do not appear to be new (such as caching). But this is misleading, because the book provides new and interesting information. For example, I had never seen a good discussion and example of caching with VaryByControl. This book has it, and shows me why I should be implementing it in my solutions. Other highlights of this book include an excellent discussion of the Microsoft ACT testing tool, and the most detailed discussion of session state and caching I've read. Really useful stuff.The topic of this book is "performance", and every chapter contributes to this goal. Many books on the market are good in parts, but they often don't hold together well. This book from start to finish has a consistent tone, and a natural progression of topics that feels well organized, and is very effective at relating the information. By the end of the book I genuinely felt that I had a new level of insight into how to write my ASP.NET apps with performance in mind. No one book can give you all the information you need. But this book stands out as one of the top 5 reference books I keep on my bookshelf (along with Ingo Rammer's .NET Remoting Book, and Jeffrey Richter's Applied .NET Programming).This book should be required reading on ASP.NET Performance!

Hasan and Tu take the reader on a pragmatic, well written, and clear journey to building high performing, secure and efficient web sites using ASP.NET. No more guessing, no more scrambling to find a solution under pressure. Armed with this book the developer can finally take a proactive design and development approach to building high performance sites. They not only cover the presentation layer but the business and data access tiers as well.My copy of this book takes its position next to Code Complete as the "go to" book for winning technical discussions, influencing decisions and for building scalable n-tier sites.I highly recommend this book for any intermediate to expert ASP.NET developer and I can't wait for their next book!

Okay, right from the start: this book is a great reference for professional developers who are looking for a collection of practical advice, important development/deployment factors to consider, and best practices when working on an ASP.NET solution.As a developer I appreciate the well-organized references. The information is to-the-point, and they truly made this book for the experienced developer by providing the answers in a professional, non-condesending way. I like the way they weigh the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches, and how they summarize what developers should consider during every step of the development life cycle. You really get a sense that Hasan and Tu have done their homework through actual hard work and experience, and not just regurgitated what someone else has published.My favorite chapters were Chapters 3, 5 and 6, particularly as a software consultant working to master ASP.NET as quickly as possible. I have 5 other, thicker books on ASP.NET sprawled acrosss my apartment, and yet this book is the one I look for whenever I have a question. I usually find what I am looking for (or on a couple occassions, I found what I was _supposed_ to look for!). Again, like I said, the information is concise, accurate, and adaptable. While I haven't yet had the resources to devote to using the MS Application Center Test (ACT) tool, Chapters 7 and 8 provide an extensive, step-by-step guide. The text is full of well-thought out, reasonable recommendations on how to optimize performance. They provide good example code that is easy to follow and adapt to my own solutions. So bottom line: this is a great reference for developers looking to take their code to the next level, who are not content with simply providing a working solution -- for those who want to provide the best solution. The recommendations and examples that are covered in this book will help you achieve that.

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.