Performance Optimization of ASP.NET Applications on Client-side

With the advent of new web applications with rich user interface, there is a lot of processing on the client side. Most of this processing is done using scripting languages like JavaScript, etc. Lot of new frameworks are in the market ranging from the ones doing simple manipulation of DOM to the most complex of templates for data and charts. Not only web 2.0 applications like Facebook, myspace are using this technology extensively, but line of business applications are also moving towards this model. Ajax technology provides users with a whole new experience which is very close to desktop applications.

New browsers are concentrating on this model as well with the introduction of new faster JavaScript engines. Chrome’s interface is done in a way that gives the impression of a stand-alone application running on top of desktop instead of an application opened in a browser.

This new model has given rise to many challenges in terms of performance of web applications. Client side frameworks and other resources like custom JavaScript files, style sheets, images, etc. are downloaded on the browser and if not managed properly, can really affect the performance of an application.

This article is more oriented towards how to improve performance of ASP.NET Ajax applications on the client side.

CodeProject – Performance Optimization of ASP.NET Applications on Client-side

10 Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs

Web design consists, for the most part, of interface design. There are many techniques involved in crafting beautiful and functional interfaces. Here’s my collection of 10 that I think you’ll find useful in your work. They’re not related to any particular theme, but are rather a collection of techniques I use in my own projects. Without further ado, let’s get started.

Smashing Magazine – 10 Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs

50 Extremely Useful And Powerful CSS Tools

We love useful stuff. For months, we have been bookmarking interesting, useful and creative CSS tools and related resources. We have been contacting developers, encouraging them to improve their tools and release their handy little apps to the public. Last year we prepared and published some of them in a series of smashing posts about CSS. Now again is the time to give these tools the attention they deserve. Big thanks to all designers and developers who contributed to the design community over the last months and years. We — our community and the design community — truly appreciate your efforts.

Below, we present 50 extremely useful CSS tools, generators, templates and resources. We did not include “traditional” CSS tools, such as Firebug or the Web Developer extension, but tried to focus on rather unknown tools that are definitely worth a look. Some tools are new and some are old, but hopefully everybody will find a couple of new useful or at least inspiring tools.

We strongly encourage you to develop these tools further, build on the ideas presented here, release new tools for the public and let us know about them. We would love to feature your handy tool in our next review.

Smashing Magazine – 50 Extremely Useful And Powerful CSS Tools

Improve your jQuery – 25 excellent tips

jQuery is awesome. I’ve been using it for about a year now and although I was impressed to begin with I’m liking it more and more the longer I use it and the more I find out about it’s inner workings.

I’m no jQuery expert. I don’t claim to be, so if there are mistakes in this article then feel free to correct me or make suggestions for improvements.

I’d call myself an "intermediate" jQuery user and I thought some others out there could benefit from all the little tips, tricks and techniques I’ve learned over the past year. The article also ended up being a lot longer than I thought it was going to be so I’ll start with a table of contents so you can skip to the bits you’re interested in.

tvi – Improve your jQuery – 25 excellent tips

Opera: Web Standards Curriculum

As the most standards-compliant Web browser, Opera is dedicated to promoting Web standards across the globe. Web standards make the Web available to anyone, on any device, anywhere in the world.

Opera has created the Web Standards Curriculum (WSC) in association with the Yahoo! Developer Network. This tutorial course takes students from complete beginner to having a solid grounding in standards-based Web design, including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript development. The course is supported by top companies and organizations such as the Web Standards Project (WaSP) and Yahoo!.

Split into more than 50 focused articles, students can follow the curriculum from start to finish or simply read articles that interest them the most. Each article contains essential theory, practical examples, and exercise questions. The first 41 articles are now published, and roughly ten ones covering JavaScript basics will follow ASAP, to complete the course.

Why should you incorporate the Opera WSC into your curriculum? Web standards in a Web site promote efficiency, ease of maintenance, accessibility, device compatibility, and search optimization. The Opera WSC features the most up-to-date practices in Web standards. Best of all, the course is free, requiring no expensive textbooks.

Opera – Web Standards Curriculum

Character encoding

Character encoding can be wickedly difficult to get right, especially when you want to start using UTF-8. It seems there is always at least one part of the chain from your brain to the end user’s browser that has problems with UTF-8.

Two articles that try explain character encoding are The Definitive Guide to Web Character Encoding and UTF-8: The Secret of Character Encoding. I won’t pretend to fully grasp character encoding, but after reading these articles I believe I at least understand it a little better.

456 Berea Street – Character encoding

Rich IntelliSense for jQuery

A while back we updated VS2008 IntelliSense to not fail when referencing jQuery. However, getting IntelliSense for chained calls and rich summary/parameter hints still required adding special comments to a few thousand lines of jQuery. If you didn’t have the time, you could download such a file from friendly members of the community such as James and Brennan.

Visual Web Developer Team Blog – Rich IntelliSense for jQuery

The Art of Programming

Do you think of programming as an art or as a necessity? Do you think of programming as a passion or just something to make money off of? Do you find that when you write a program you are brought to a place that can no longer be called a job, but a life changing experience?

"A man can be an artist… in anything, food, whatever. It depends on how good he is at it. Creasey’s art is death. He’s about to paint his masterpiece." – Man on Fire

spoiled techie – The Art of Programming

Essential Visual Studio Tips & Tricks that Every Developer Should Know

In this blog entry, I list the essential tips and tricks that every developer who uses Visual Studio 2008 should know. I wanted to keep this list brief. I also wanted to focus on only those tips and tricks that I use on a daily basis. Almost all of these tips and tricks are just as useful regardless of whether you are building an ASP.NET Web Forms or ASP.NET MVC application.

Stephen Walther on ASP.NET MVC – Essential Visual Studio Tips & Tricks that Every Developer Should Know

  1. You don’t need to select a line to copy or delete it
  2. You can add a namespace automatically by pressing CTRL-.
  3. Never create properties by hand
  4. You can remove and sort unnecessary using statements
  5. Use CTRL-k+c to comment out code
  6. You can close all documents except the current one
  7. You can open a database by double-clicking the database file in App_Data
  8. You can copy a file or folder into a project by dragging and dropping
  9. Use CTRL-SPACE to perform statement completion
  10. Add new items by pressing CTRL-N or CTRL-SHIFT+A
  11. You don’t need to type file extensions when adding a file

Migrate apps from Internet Explorer to Mozilla

When Netscape started the Mozilla browser, it made the conscious decision to support W3C standards. As a result, Mozilla is not fully backwards-compatible with Netscape Navigator 4.x and Microsoft Internet Explorer legacy code; for example, Mozilla does not support as I will discuss later. Browsers, like Internet Explorer 4, that were built before the conception of W3C standards inherited many quirks. In this article, I will describe Mozilla’s quirks mode, which provides strong backwards HTML compatibility with Internet Explorer and other legacy browsers.

MDC – Migrate apps from Internet Explorer to Mozilla

CSS Sprites2 – It’s JavaScript Time

A sense of movement is often the differentiator between Flash-heavy web sites and standards-based sites. Flash interfaces have always seemed more alive—responding to the user’s interactions in a dynamic way that standards-based web sites haven’t been able to replicate.

Lately that’s been changing, of course, with a resurgence in dynamic interface effects, helped along by JavaScript libraries that make it easy—libraries such as Prototype, Scriptaculous, Moo, YUI, MochiKit (and I could go on). It’s high time to revisit the CSS Sprites technique from four years ago, and see if we can’t interject a little bit of movement of our own.

A List Apart: Articles: CSS Sprites2 – CSS Sprites2 – It’s JavaScript Time