My web wanderings

A look at Microsoft’s internal SDL with the new Trustworthy Computing initiative.

IIS 6 Peformance Paper - Worth the read

By Brett ‘brett’ Hill on IISFAQ Front Page

Papers from Microsoft are often hit and miss. Some are stellar and some are overbroad overviews filled with marketing jargon. This one, however, is well worth the read. He’s an excerpt from Web and Application Server Infrastructure - Performance and Scalability

COM General

With the new IIS 6.0 architecture, it is important to question some of the existing guidelines where COM is concerned. A major consideration is that, before Windows Server 2003, COM application components were configured (by default) to run out-of-processes from the caller. The default for COM applications is for them to run as Server Applications, executing in a DLLHost.exe process called into from the object instantiate, or over DCOM.

The performance downside of doing this for every method call, is that there are extra threads running on the system, and every call to a method must be marshaled across process boundaries. This is not noticeable on a small implementation with low request/transaction rates, but on a high volume, large multiprocessor, this kind of overhead can greatly decrease the overall scalability of the system.

Therefore, on Windows Server 2003, it is best to change the default configuration for a COM Server Application to Library Application to aid scalability of the calling per use of that application

< Soap Box> The entire world is not using Microsoft technologies to develop. So PLEASE do NOT embed non-standard code into web standard code. Such as do not embed C# into an XSLT. XSLT’s are meant to be platform agnostic. That is what makes XML and its supporting technologies so valuable. What if someone wants to use the XSLT in say Java or some other language. < / Soap Box>

Netron Light: a lightweight version of the Netron graph control is available for download . Read the article entitled ‘Diagramming for dummies’ (PDF fromat, 15 pages) to find out what it is. The article is enclosed in the download as well. Hopefully this simple control will reach even more developers. This simplified version is filling a gap in the market or, at least, this is my conclusion from the mails and forum postings. The article can also be found on the CodeProject space.

I have found the following useful items for my project at work to automate our deployment process.

1.   Learn the basics of all Microsoft products’ keyboard shortcuts.
2.   Become expert in Visual Studio .NET keyboard shortcuts.
3.   Serve some speed with SQL Server shortcuts.
4.   Mozilla browsers go here, IE browsers go here and select your IE version.
5.   Do you use Google? Of course you do. Check out Google Labs’ experimental Keyboard Shortcuts searching.

John Lam has launched Practical Eye for the .NET Guy (subscription link in the sidebar), a newsletter dedicated to practical advice for working .NET developers. The first issue has some thoughts on build processes and an excellent NAnt tutorial. Good stuff.

Understanding WSDL - Aaron Skonnard walks through the basics in a nice clear article.