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.