• Real World ASP.NET Best Practices
• Maximizing .NET Performance (Expert's Voice)
• Professional ASP.NET Performance
• Performance Testing Microsoft .NET Web Applications (Pro-Developer)
• Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability (Patterns & Practices)

I would preferred to see real world examples of when caching was implemented and how they tackled real problems. The sample code snippets they provide are basic knowledge and are available in the documentation.

This book should be called "Asp.Net and Ado tutorial with a shallow chapter on asp.net caching."

The Review

Chapter 1:

The book starts with basics about performance turning such as Throughput, "Response Time" and "Request bytes out total". This chapter also provides introduction to Windows performance utility and Microsoft Application Center Test utility.

Chapter 2:

This chapter provides thousand feet overview of ASP.NET. This chapter also discusses the performance related issues with Viewstate and how to measure that using the inbuilt ASP.NET tracing feature. This chapter covers the performance impacts of encoding and encrypting the Viewstate using the EnableViewStateMac attribute of the Page directive.

This chapter also provides some vital information about ASP.NET configuration files and how to add app level configuration settings that is custom configuration settings (Very few books address this option.) One cool tip that really like about this chapter is that, "Persisting view state across multiple pages (Page No 37)".

Chapter 3:

This chapter starts with an overview of ADO.NET and teaches how we can improve performance of our application by turning the data access code. This chapter explains the relationship between DataSet's and XML. How the validate a DataSet with an XSD and Typed DataSet.

Chapter 4:

This chapter is a well-written chapter that provides ample amount of information about ASP.NET Session store and compares performance impacts of each of these stores. This chapter not only talks about how to read custom information from the web.config files, this chapter also shows the how to read it in the code (Very cool). Finally this chapter talks about "Choosing the right ASP.NET session store option."

Chapter 5:

This is a very nice chapter that talks about all the aspects of caching including output and data. I wish the authors covered the Shared attribute. One real good thing about this chapter is that, it goes above and beyond the ASP.NET web caching and talks about how to use ISA server for ASP.NET caching (including forward caching and reverse caching)

Chapter 6:

This is a typical web services chapter that teaches how to write web services using ASP.NET engine (including all the web services and web method related CLR attributes).

The later part of the chapter covers the SOAP exceptions and how to raise one, calling web services with asynchronously using server-side and client-side web services behaviors, web services security and web services Vs Remoting. Finally this chapter talks about "Optimizing web services design" with 9 points.

Chapter 7:

This is a very nice chapter that covers all aspects of stress testing and monitoring ASP.NET applications including,

· Concepts behind stress testing including latency, throughput and utilization
· Performance testing approaches such as load/stress testing, scalability and transaction cost analysis
· Best practices for stress testing
· Using the ACT tool.

Chapter 8:

This chapter talks about the debugging and tracing features of ASP.NET applications. This includes types of execution, debugging, tracing, event logging and performance counters.

This book is a welcome addition to the programmer's bookshelf. The only thing that is missing from this book is that, this book had covered hardcore tools such as "Rational Quentify", "Intel's .NET Performance" tools, that would have been a helpful addition.

This material contains in-depth discussions about choosing the best caching technology, data structures, state management and almost every single topic that will help you delivery a fast and scalable application.

After reading this book you will be ready to answer any type of performance-related questions to your customers and peers (which is always something nice)

My advice is not to wait until you are code complete in order to start thinking about performance. Tackle this issue early in the design phase and you will save tons of hours and money by minimizing tuning efforts on an already optimized architecture

Strongly recommended!

There is a lot of detail here, but I never felt overwhelmed by it. At first glance, some of the topics in this book do not appear to be new (such as caching). But this is misleading, because the book provides new and interesting information. For example, I had never seen a good discussion and example of caching with VaryByControl. This book has it, and shows me why I should be implementing it in my solutions. Other highlights of this book include an excellent discussion of the Microsoft ACT testing tool, and the most detailed discussion of session state and caching I've read. Really useful stuff.

The topic of this book is "performance", and every chapter contributes to this goal. Many books on the market are good in parts, but they often don't hold together well. This book from start to finish has a consistent tone, and a natural progression of topics that feels well organized, and is very effective at relating the information. By the end of the book I genuinely felt that I had a new level of insight into how to write my ASP.NET apps with performance in mind.

No one book can give you all the information you need. But this book stands out as one of the top 5 reference books I keep on my bookshelf (along with Ingo Rammer's .NET Remoting Book, and Jeffrey Richter's Applied .NET Programming).

This book should be required reading on ASP.NET Performance!

My favorite topics included using session state management, writing optimized data access, understanding viewstate and even using Microsoft's ACT!

Most of all, the authors devoted a solid chapter on Stress Testing and Monitoring Performance. I found this to be the most important chapter because it covered the concepts behind analyzing and measuring the performance of your site. This chapter's concepts apply to all other topics in the book.

This book is a must have for ASP.NET developers!

The technical book market today is flooded with a slew of titles on how to build applications with the .NET technology, and many are undoubtedly very good. But the majority of these titles simply take a "how-to" approach on programming with the .NET Framework. They often pay little more than cursory attention to the real-world issues and challenges that developers face. Performance is one of those challenges.

This book is for intermediate to advanced .NET developers who need answers to the hard questions on how to build high-performance ASP.NET applications. Authors Jeffrey Hasan and Kenneth Tu focus on how to make good design decisions for performance. They discuss how to develop applications with performance in mind. And they pay special attention to the tools available to developers to quantify and monitor performance issues and to diagnose performance problems more quickly.

Infused with the authors' collective experiences, gathered from years of building high-performance web applications, this is a book that developers will want to keep on the shelf for a long time.