Introduction

The Internet has developed at an astonishing pace over the past several years . Until quite recently, most Web sites consisted of a collection of static pages linked in a web of hyperlinks and anchor tags. From these humble origins, a typical Web site today is a rich, graphically intense experience that interacts with the user. Currently, Web sites are more feature-rich than ever before, and developers face the dual challenges of delivering rich features and delivering good performance. The best Web site in the world will impress no one if the pages will not load quickly and the user is kept waiting. At best, you risk annoying the user and having them leave your site, never to return. At worst, you can lose revenue if the site in question is a high-volume e-commerce site that must perform quickly and reliably for a large number of users.

Today's sophisticated Web users demand functionality and performance, and they are unsympathetic to any tradeoff between the two. As a developer, and as a reader of this book, you need to know the tools and techniques to provide users with both. A Web application is simply a collection of display elements and business components that collaborate to provide a workspace for accomplishing tasks . They are, of course, built on an Internet technology substrate, which includes by-now familiar technologies such as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) for rendering content and protocols such as Extensible Markup Language (XML), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) for delivering the content across the wire. You can serve up Web applications on the public Internet or simply on a private Intranet. Whichever is the case matters little from a purely development perspective because the technical challenges are similar for the developer. The deployment and security challenges certainly are not, but that is a topic for another book.

This book focuses on building high-performance Web applications using Microsoft's ASP.NET technology. Pure and simple. The technical book market today is being flooded with a slew of titles on how to build applications with .NET technology, and many are undoubtedly very good. But the majority of these titles simply take a "how-to" approach on how to program with the .NET Framework. They often pay little more than cursory attention to the real-world issues and challenges that developers face. The learning curve for .NET clearly starts with understanding the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and the new Class Framework because they enable you to actually build your application. But from there, the learning curve shifts toward more complex and less neat issues such as design decisions and the relative performance of one technical approach over another. At this level, it is no longer a question of how you implement a feature.

It becomes a question of what is the optimal way to implement the feature to ensure elegant, bug-free code and excellent performance.

Who This Book Is For

The target audience for this book is intermediate to advanced developers who have some experience working with .NET technology in general and ASP.NET technology in particular. The ideal reader falls in the gray area between the two learning curves described in the previous section. In other words, this reader is past the stage where they need to read another language-focused, how-to book; instead, they need a book that tackles real-world issues and challenges with ASP.NET applications. There is clearly no substitute to grinding through the discovery process of how to code with .NET. But once you get past these initial stages, you are ready to start asking the tough questions, such as the following:

• Which data access method gives me the best performance for the kind of data with which I am working?

• My Web application uses Session variables : Is this still taboo?

• What are my options for caching sections of my Web application?

• I cannot get enough of using view state: Is this a good thing?

• How do I monitor the performance of my application?

• How scalable is my application? Will it break under pressure?

• How do I manage state on a server farm?

If this list does not get you sweating, then nothing else will!