Milan Negovan has written an article to provide in-depth prospective on view state mechanism. In his article, he suggested some do’s and dont’s on using view state, like how simply disabling view state of whole page, can great enhance the performance of page if you just need to display a DataGrid on the page with no PostBack.

URL: ASP.NET State Management: View State

I have seen many times, that developers keep EnableViewState true even if they simply have to display a single page report (as most of the reports as basically rendered using DataGrid, and this DataGrid control really generate huge stuff for view state).

Alternatively, you can also think of storing view state of page at server. How? Milan has answer of this question in his article.

Yes, you can now compile your C# or VB.NET code online, simply put your code in the provided text box and click “Compile Now” button. Compilr will compile your code and provide you the link as well to download complied version of your code. Any error while compilation will display error message on page.

URL: Compilr

Once upon a time there was a shepherd looking after his sheep on the side of a deserted road. Suddenly a brand new Porsche screeches to a halt. The driver, a man dressed in an Armani suit, Cerutti shoes, Ray-Ban sunglasses, TAG-Heuer wrist-watch, and a Pierre Cardin tie, gets out and asks the shepherd: “If I can tell you how many sheep you have, will you give me one of them?” The shepherd looks at the young man, and then looks at the large flock of grazing sheep and replies: “Okay.” The young man parks the car, connects his laptop to the mobile-fax, enters a NASA Webster, scans the ground using his GPS, opens a database and 60 Excel tables filled with logarithms and pivot tables, then prints out a 150 page report on his high-tech mini-printer. He turns to the shepherd and says, “You have exactly 1,586 sheep here.” The shepherd cheers, “That’s correct, you can have your sheep.”

The young man makes his pick and puts it in the back of his Porsche. The shepherd looks at him and asks: “If I guess your profession, will you return my animal to me?” The young man answers, “Yes, why not?” The shepherd says, “You are an IT consultant.” “How did you know?” asks the young man. “Very simple,” answers the shepherd. “First, you came here without being called. Second, you charged me a fee to tell me something I already knew, and third, you don’t understand anything about my business…Now can I have my DOG back?”

Markus Frind has posted his experience of using ASP.NET 2.0 for one of largest dating site PlentyOfFish.com in Canada. In his post, Markus is telling how he has addressed concurrency issues by switching to ASP.NET 2.0:

At this point there were a lot of concurrency issues, the site would slooow down and just keep getting slower as more people came on. After switching to asp.net 2.0 all those problems went away. Now when there are over 32,000 concurrent connections at peak the site does not slow down. There are however still problems. I find that once you pass 100 Pageviews/second threads timers start to not get called for no reason.

URL : Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Performance

Interestingly, he didn’t use any kind of caching to render pages. Every page hit actually pull content from database.

Great Post!

While creating word documents, another most laborious task is setting same kind of style like font face, font size, font color etc. for desired text block of the document (to give some more professional look to document). Some expert word users may define text style and then use that across page, but most people specifically set font setting on each selected text block. And when they have to use same text style to another text bock, then they will select that text and again set style through using font face/size dropdown and color dropdown to that block as well.

Here is the great tip for those people. You can simply use hotkey Ctrl+Shift+C to copy style of the selected text and Ctrl+Shift+V to paste copied style to selected text. It will keep your text as it is and will only applying style to the selected text block.

So next time, when you have already set font style of header of first paragraph and you want to apply same style for rest of paragraph headers, you know how to do that fast.