PeterKellner.net

As many of you know, I’ve been organizing CodeCamp here in Silicon Valley (Northern California) for the past month or so.

We have over 40 sessions signed up now and closing in on 700 attendees! Yee ha, this is getting fun. Please visit the site and if you have any feedback, please send it to me through the contact me page on this blog. Included in the 14 class rooms that are available to us, we plan on using 5 that are fully equipped with internet connected PC’s. Through these PC’s, I expect people to be constantly checking the schedules and adding feedback to classes they are attending. I’m currently having some trouble with printing the schedule through the sessions page, buth hopefully some one will come to my rescue soon on that.

I’ve been busy running SqlServer Tracing to Cache every database access I can possibly cache. The sessions page, which touches almost every table, does not create one database hit once the data is cached. My ISP (ultimate hosting) assures me we have a beefy server at the other end of the pipe. It’s a college campus on a weekend so the pipe from codecamp will be wide open. Hopefully all my hard work will run well when put to the test.

Wish us luck

Abstract

In this article we will demonstrate a technique used to automatically add Wiki Pages to PBWiki using
the not quite released API provided by the peanut butter guys. The demonstration will involve integrating scheduled presentations at our Silicon Valley Code Camp on October 7th and 8th each with its own Wiki Page. Without the API, creating and linking the presentation to a Wiki page would have to be an ugly manual process involving the dreaded cut and pasting of URL’s.

Background

So, to begin with, I’m an enterprise database kind of guy and to be frank, Wiki’s scare me a little. The
idea of adhoc data being deposited by anyone onto a page with no real structures just makes me nervous. My
smart friends tell me I should embrace the chaos so I’m trusting them and going for it.

Abstract

This article shows how to use Expression Builders in ASP.NET 2.0 to retrieve the current logged in user. DataBinding will not work so Expression Builders is the ticket. A small source file is created, the references to web.config are shown and a simple example is built.

The Problem

I recently was looking at unanswered posts in the asp.net forum, specifically this one: http://forums.asp.net/thread/1402259.aspx. I thought I
understood how databinding and expressions worked, but just wanted to check myself. So, I made a simple example
web page just like the post shows. (see below)

Performance Comparison

Recently, I’ve been wondering what the difference is between rendering an image using IIS’s built in file handling capabilities, or using the asp.net with a custom handler. I decided to do a little test program to simply see the difference in clock time for processing such requests. The results of this test clearly show that IIS is faster. Sometimes a little, and sometimes a lot. I decided to test three size images, and run them each 10 times. Often, there is a start up lag time so the iterations should wash that out.

The table below basically sums up the results pretty well. The resolution of my timer is not great so for small images (35KB), both IIS and the handler processed the image in under 15 milliseconds. There may be a difference but in
my case, it was probably not measurable because of all the other time involved in the request. For Medium size images (550KB), difference is more consistent. Again, it’s a timer resolution problem that makes 15 milliseconds probably something related to a CPU click of sorts. For large images (5.6MB) you can clearly see a difference. The time it takes for the handler to process the image is almost double that of IIS.

Microsoft just published my fourth article. This one is titled: "Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Member/Role Management with IIS, Part 4: Adding Personalization with Profiles to the ObjectDataSource".

You can find it on MSDN here, or on my blog here.

Here is the introduction.