Unless you have a great product, service or idea for which people are willing to wait, chances are highly likely that these potential clients will leave your website should your response time take too long to their incoming requests.  Ignore your application’s performance and you are more likely to be dumped by your users sooner than expected.

Teaching You Tools to Become Empowered

To build a successful business and career, you must always keep up with changes in the IT Marketplace. AWS, Office 365, LinkedIn, Sales Force, SEO, Social Media are just a few examples of where knowledge is a huge factor for success.

Training with HSG addresses your knowledge gaps and provides you with the requisite tools to outpace the competition.

To improve the performance of an ASP.Net application you need to optimize your front-end UI (user interface) code as well as the back-end database. You can also think of the following tips as a brief best practices guide for the ASP.net performance optimization. So, whether you are a developer, UI designer or member of the deployment team, the following tips may help you. No matter what’s your role in the project or what you do to boost performance of your application, always remember that your goal should be to:

·          Minimize the amount of data you sent across the network.

·          Reduce the number of server requests.

Here you go (in no particular order)

At Database level

#10. Use Stored Procedures. A Stored Procedure has an execution plan hence it always performs faster than T-SQL. Logic separation, Low network bandwidth consumption, improved data security and integrity are some of the added benefits of using a stored procedure.

#9. Write efficient queries. A few tips:

·          If needed, de-normalize your database design a bit. Too many joins can make your query expensive.

·          Avoid the use of cursor.

·          Return only the  Rows and Columns needed.

·          Fully qualify database objects.

At Application Level

#8. ViewState is a bandwidth guzzler. To make its handling simple, always remember that for almost all practical purposes you can disable it for most of the controls (exception being DropDownLists, Listboxes and TreeViews). For TextBoxes, ViewState needs to be enabled only if you are using Text_Changed event. In a page if you are absolutely sure that you don’t require it all then it’s better to disable it at Page level. Add the following to your Page directive <%@ Page EnableViewState="false" %>

#7. SSL (Secure Socket Layer i.e. URLs beginning with https) is in fashion but avoid it and use it only for pages that transmit sensitive information like password, credit card number or any other information you deem sensitive. If you are using SSL for a page make sure the page contains minimal graphics. A web page deployed under simple http performs much faster than an https page.

#6. If you care about Scalability avoid using session state. Performance is not an issue while you are using one web server but be prepared for the worst if you are scaling out to multiple servers. At the same time, if you are sure that your application will never require multiple servers (or you’ll always have a limited number of users) session state is your best bait and performs faster than any other state management options.

#5. Use image sprites. Yes, this tip is more relevant to the UI designer than the developer. Sprites reduce the number of server requests and hence your page loads faster. W3Schools define an image sprite as a collection of images put into a single image. So, you are downloading a single optimized image with a single request rather than downloading multiple images with multiple requests. With CSS, you can define the coordinates to show just the part of the image you need

.#4. Add script references at the bottom of the page. Script references mainly JavaScript are common in ASP.Net applications, and if they are referred at the top the asynchronous downloads halt when a script reference is reached, severely impacting the page performance.

#3. For applications with huge number of users spread around the globe, use CDN (Content Delivery Network) for hosting images and scripts. This reduces load on your server and your users experiences a quick response from your application.

#2. Include the values of height and width attribute in tag. Yes, this is another one for UI designers! With a well-defined explicit height and width attribute space can be allocated for the image before it is downloaded i.e. quick page load.

#1. Validate form entries on the client using JavaScript. This helps to avoid unnecessary round trips to the server making your application quick and responsive. It leads to a better user experience.

Bonus Tip

Although this one is the most important yet it is the most common committed crime by beginners. While deploying at production server make sure that in the web.config file debug attribute is set to false. Always remember:

Never run production ASP.NET applications with debug=”true” enabled. By default it is enabled true in your web.config file. At production server it must be deployed with . There’s a detailed article devoted to this web.config debug attribute from none other than Scott Guthrie (an ASP.Net authority and a big shot at Microsoft Corp.)

There are many other tips and best practices recommended by experts and Microsoft for ASP.Net development; however these are the basic and most important ones. Apply these tips and see the difference in your application’s performance.