10 cool web development related articles in 2007

Here’s a list of 10 cool ASP.NET, AJAX and web development
related articles and blog posts that I have written this year that
you might want to take a look:

13
disasters for production website and their solutions
Talks about 13 production disasters that can happen to any website
any time and bring down your business.

Build
Google IG like Ajax Start Page in 7 days using ASP.NET Ajax and
.NET 3.0
This block buster article shows how ASP.NET AJAX, Linq to XML, Linq
to SQL and Workflow Foundation can be used to create a Google IG
like start page in just 7 nights. Learn how to put together such
hot technologies into one project and make a production site out of
it.

Serve extensionless URL from ASP.NET without using ISAPI module or
IIS 6 Wildcard mapping
Currently there are only two ways to service extentionless URL like
www.pageflakes.com/omar that
hits something besides the default document – use a custom ISAPI
module or use IIS 6 wildcard mapping. Both has performance and
scalability problems because both intercepts each and every hit.
Learn how you can solve it by using a custom 404 handler.

Request format is unrecognized for URL unexpectedly ending in
/SomeWebServiceMethod
Since ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 release, Microsoft prevented JSON hijacking
by adding a special content type header. But this caused us some
trouble.

Cleanup inactive anonymous users from ASP.NET Membership
Tables
When you store anonymous user profile using ASP.NET Membership
provider and Anonymous Identification provider, you soon end up
with lots of idle anonymous user data where those users never come
back. We (Pageflakes) went through a lot of difficulty keeping our
database size down as we allow anonymous users to do almost
everything that a registered user can do. This introduces
scalability challenge. See how we solved this problem.

Prevent Denial of Service (DOS) attacks in your web
application
Web applications can be brought down to its knees by hitting the
site repeatedly or by calling expensive webservices randomly.
Anyone can write a simple loop that hits a webserver very
frequently from a high bandwidth connectivity and bring your
production server down. See how to prevent such application level
DOS attacks.

ASP.NET Ajax Extender for multi-column widget drag &
drop
It’s an ASP.NET AJAX extender that allows Pageflakes style drag
& drop functionality between columns and rows.

ASP.NET Ajax in-depth performance analysis
While building an open source start page using ASP.NET AJAX, I have
done a lot of performance analysis on AJAX framework in order to
improve first time load and perceived speed of javascript rich
pages. Check out my analysis.

Think you know how to write UPDATE statement? Think again.
Learn how to optimize common UPDATE statements

Make a surveillance application which captures desktop and then
emails you as attachment
Some time back I needed to capture a certain computers desktop in
order to find out what that user is doing every day. So, I made a
.NET 2.0 Winforms Application which stays on system tray (optional)
and capture the desktop in given time interval (say every 60 secs)
and emailed the captured images to me as message attachment (say
every 30 mins).

Today I received MVP award for the 3rd time on Visual C#. Thanks
to Microsoft for the award and setting up my new blog. I will continue
both my MVPS Blog and this
blog from now on.