Tim Stanley photos

Pretty Good URLs

With a little forethought and planning, it’s possible to create URLs that can be around the web for a long time and as Tim Berners-Lee pointed out cool URIs don't change.  Choose wisely though, you may have to live with the URLs for much longer than you think, or if your not careful, you may end up with too many URLs pointing to the same content. Read More...

 
 

How To Restart ASP.Net Applications

Many times, from an administration perspective, it's desirable to restart an ASP.NET web site without restarting IIS on the whole server. Read More...

 
 

Using Cache And Compression For Performance

Most browsers and servers have default values that provide fairly good performance with a minimum caching of static file content.  A little bit of coaxing can result in better performance with less traffic and less bandwidth.

There are two types of caching I discuss: static content  (*.JPG, *.JPEG, *.png, *.gif, *.ico) rarely updated and semi-static content (*.js, *.css) updated very infrequently.  The decision to cache page output (*.aspx, *.html, *.htm) long term is too dependent on application functionality decisions to discuss generically. Read More...

 
 

Visual Studio 2008 Hot Fix Recommended

Short on the heels of the Visual Studio 2008 release in November 2007, Microsoft released in early February a hot fix that contains several fixes.  I took a bit of time before jumping on the Hot fix for production projects, but there are several IDE editing and build improvements for those using ASP.NET. 

Based on the list of fixes surrounding HTML source view / HTML editing, JavaScript editing, and web site  build performance, it looks very compelling to apply this fix .  I've updated today and see no adverse side effects yet.  The hot fix installation instructions state it can be uninstalled in the future if needed.

The information on the hot fix details and the download can be found in Scott Guthrie's post VS 2008 Web Development Hot-Fix Roll-Up Available.