Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is the latest buzzword in the Information Technology (IT). In this article I will try to explain what is cloud computing and the essence of cloud computing.
Definition of cloud:
Before we know what is cloud computing it’s very much essential to know what is a ‘cloud’. Cloud is a web or internet and which can be accessed throughout without any know boundaries over the internet.
What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing is a term used when software is hosted on a cloud. All the required services to run software are provided as a service over internet.
Cloud computing allows you to deploy and access everything from single system to massive amount or IT resources on demand , in real time and at affordable price.
There are number of companies which are currently providing this service. Following are some of the of companies which provide cloud computing facility.
• Microsoft
• Google
• Amazon
• IBM
• Yahoo
Cloud computing helps companies to reduce their cost on software, hardware. Now with the help of cloud computing companies can take help of available infrastructure to host their software with nominal fees.
Cloud computing heavily relies on Virtual Machines(VMs) which can be easily extended based on user demand.
Characteristics of cloud computingInfrastructure management: it manages critical OS updates and management task.
Simplifies capacity planning : additional services can be available on demand. Therefore no need to plan/procure additional expensive hardware or software.
Reduces Cost : cloud computing reduces cost on infrastructure, companies no need to hire IT resources for implementation.
Reduces the cost of running data centers : Companies no need to allocate separate space to have their own datacenter.

Visual Studio 2010 and Dot Net Framework 4.0

Visual Studio 2010 and Dot Net Framework 4.0

This is continuation of my series on Dot Net Framework 4.0, Dublin, Visual Studio 2010…

On 29th Sep 2008 Microsoft announced release of Visual Studio 2010 and the Framework 4.0, the main aim behind release of these products is to target new trends such as cloud computing , SOA, application life cycle management etc.

The Visual Studio Team System 2010 is code named as “Rosaria”, complete details about the product is not yet released by the Microsoft, we can expect lots of new information about Visual Studio 2010 and Dot Net Framework 4.0 in coming days.
One of the cool features of Visual Studio 2010 is the support for cloud development with Windows Azur tool for Visual Studio 2010. Windows Azur is the new cloud service, Windows Azur allows developer with on demand compute and storage to host web application on the internet through Microsoft data center. (I will explain Windows Azur in my forthcoming blog).

There are lots of changes compared to Visual Studio 2008 in Visual Studio 2010.. Now Visual Studio 2010 is fully supported by Silverlight.
JavaScript InelliSense engine is completely enhanced.
Visual Studio Team Suite for Architecture allows users to define their business processes very easily. Now a person who has very little knowledge on technology side can easily design their business process graphically. VSTS 2010 for Architecture supports both UML and Domain Specific Language (DSL) such as “M” which can be used with Microsoft’s “Oslo” model.
There are lots of new testing feature included in the new release of Visual Studio 2010. And even lots of enhancement in Team Foundation Server (TFS), now with new version of TFS it’s easy to trace and track work more easily

There are lots of things which still need to be explained, which I will do in my forthcoming blog…

About Dot Net Framework 4.0 and Dublin

Microsoft is releasing Dot Net Framework once in a a year or so, look at following history of Dot Net Framework..

Version Version Number Release Date
1.0 1.0.3705.0 2002-01-05
1.1 1.1.4322.573 2003-04-01
2.0 2.0.50727.42 2005-11-07
3.0 3.0.4506.30 2006-11-06
3.5 3.5.21022.8 2007-11-09

and now its turn of Dot Net Framework 4.0

Why Dot Net Framework 4.0??

More and more companies are adopting Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), (I am not going to explain SOA in this post, and it’s such an overloaded term and requires special dedication to explain)
Service Orientation mainly takes use of WS-* standards to achieve service orientation.
Managing new requirements, developing those requirements is become more complex.

To overcome these difficulties Microsoft has enhanced .Net Framework and Windows Server, new version of Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF); Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a part of .Net Framework 4.0 for Windows Server.

These enhanced capabilities codenamed as "Dublin" by Microsoft.

With these release, WWF and WCF, IIS become tightly coupled and is more enhanced.

WWF is become 10 times faster than earlier version. Workflow modeling is enhanced and comes with lots of prebuilt activities.

Now workflow designer is become more easier than earlier one.

Dublin is currently available with only Windows Server.

Tips To Scale Up IIS

I am writing this blog after long time, this time I have decided to write something on IIS 6.0.
Most of us are having very little knowledge on IIS 6.0 configuration and we know very little about the capabilities of IIS 6.0. Being a technical guy, the person who is involved in application development should know in and out of all the configuations which will help us to develope scalable application. I mean to say that, whether person is a Sr Manager or a trainee developer he should know all these tricks.

Following are some of the tricks which we can use to scale up IIS 6.0

1. Recycle
Recycle IIS processes on certain interval , though IIS does it on every 29 hours. Right click on 'Application Pool' , click on 'Properties' . Follwing window will get displayed.







Even you can specify timing when IIS should recycle worker process or on number of requests.

2. Grow Web Garden
This is one of the way to increase application pool performance. Web garder helps in a scenariao when worker processes gets hanged and nother worker process can take care of incoming requests.
3. Enable HTTP Compression
Its better to compress pages which IIS is serving, but its not good to compress all the files.
Not all the requested pages are generated dynamically, for example static HTML files are not generated dynamically , so its better to compress these files using HTTP compression , so next time when IIS receives request for these static files, it will get it from the cache. IIS does not need to compress it again.








Right click on 'Web Sites' -> 'Properties' and click on 'Service' tab to enable HTTP compression.

4. Connection Timeouts
HTTP connections may keep open while user downloading files from the server, IIS terminates these connections after 120 seconds by default.But you can adjust these connection timeout accordingly.
5. HTTP Keep Alive.

IIS enables Keep-Alive by default. The main advantage behind HTTP Keep Alive is , it does not allow server to close and open server connection again and again. This helps to optimize server performance

Please note, only some part of scalability is achieved through IIS configuration, if your code is not well written, database design is not proper and has number of open connections etc ect, then above mentioned tricks are of no use.

New Feature of ASP.net 2.0 [Asynchronous Pages]

Microsoft's release of .Net Framework 2.0 is become big hit in the market. Definitely there is a reason behind this..
There are lots of improvements and cool features made available in the the latest version of .Net Framework 2.0 (the latest version of .Net Framework is 3.5) compared to its earlier version 1.x. Few of the cool features such as master pages, themes, profiles, new improved grid view,login controls etc etc.. but one of the nice feature which Microsoft has released with .Net Framework 2.0 is "Asynchronous Pages".
In this topic I am mainly going to talk about this "Asynchronous Pages" in .Net Framework 2.0.

Before I proceed I want to discuss bit about what is "Asynchronous" and "Synchronous" process.

In simple term Synchronous waits for the response whereas Asynchronous does not wait for the response..

For example if you are sending a request using synchronous .aspx page for querying a remote database,thread for the request will be alive until and unless remote database send back response back to the requesting page. Since .net framework allows limited thread pool , this can slow down the performance of the application drastically and all other requests to the server will be queued up.

But in case of Asynchronous Pages in .net framework 2.0 thread will return to the thread pool once it sends request to the server and once servern sends request back it takes another thread from the pool and finishes request.

Dot Net Interview Questions

I am starting this blog by sharing few of the Dot Net Interview questions which will be helpful for any Dot Net profession to get a job.

ASP.Net Questions

1. Authentication in ASP.net
2. Validation Controls
3. Difference between user control and custom control
4. What is Event Bubbling

C# Questions

1. What is an Indexer
2. What is Delegate
3. What is Multicast Delegate
4. What is static Constructor
5. What is an interface
6. How do you achieve multiple inheritance using c#
7. What is an abstract class
8. Access modifiers in c#
9. What is a sealed class
10. Difference between Abstract class and Interface.
11. What is overload