Month: April 2007

NYC stuff

Interesting stuff in NYC over the next few weeks:

I’ll have to see if I can free up some time, and maybe talk a friend into checking at least *some* of this stuff out. I’m not getting out of the apartment enough lately!

ACM

A few months back, I blogged about ACM’s deal with Safari and Books 24×7, where ACM members can access a subset of these online libraries. At the time, the book selection on both sites seemed to be a bit out of date. Well, they’ve updated the selection on both sites today, and there’s definitely more useful stuff up there now. They’ve (finally) got some ASP.NET 2.0 stuff, including the “ASP.NET 2.0 Core Reference” book by Dino Esposito, which is pretty useful. They even have some stuff on WCF and WPF.

The printing capabilities on Safari have gotten a bit more useful, too. I don’t remember exactly how it used to work, but it’s definitely easier to print a big chunk of text than it used to be.

I’m not sure that much has changed on the Books 24×7 site, though. I think there’s more .Net 2.0 stuff than there used to be, but I did a search on “Vista” and found nothing at all, initially. That’s not good. (I later found two Vista books that inexplicably did not show up when I searched for “vista”.) The Safari site has about four Vista books, which is OK, but not great.

asp.net performance

We’ve been having some trouble with our main ASP.NET application in work recently. (It’s our intranet, basically.) It’s been growing a lot lately, with more and more functionality being added to it, and more and more users accessing it. It’s running on a Windows 2000 server under ASP.NET 1.1. I have a new server set up that I’m planning on moving it to — it’s running Windows Server 2003, and I was planning on upgrading the app to ASP.NET 2.0 before moving it over. Given the performance problems, though, and my general lack of spare time, I’m thinking about moving it over as is, just to see if that helps, then maybe upgrading it to 2.0 later, when I have some time.

I know that there’s probably a lot I could do to tweak the performance on this application. We’ve done very little in the way of performance-tuning on our ASP.NET stuff. I discovered a book from Microsoft yesterday, Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability, which I think should be some help in guiding us through some tuning and optimization. The book is available as a PDF download, and it’s about 1100 pages. I read through a couple of chapters tonight, and it’s definitely got some useful advice on ASP.NET, ADO.NET, and SQL Server tuning. There’s plenty more in there too, but that’s all I’ve had time to read so far. I’m finding it useful enough that I went over to Amazon and ordered a used copy of the dead tree version. Highly recommended, if you need to do some .Net tuning, and you’re not sure where to start.

KeePass

I finally finished entering all my passwords into KeePass. I previously blogged about this here and here. So it looks like it took me a little over a month to get this done.

I see that the author of KeePass is working on a 2.0 version, rewriting it in .NET/C#. That’s pretty interesting; I’m curious to see if anyone will create a usable Mac version (running under Mono). Some of the features he’s including in 2.0 sound good too.

Now, I just need to come up with a viable way of keeping the database in sync between my PC and Mac. I may try doing it with FolderShare. I’m using that on my work PC and home PC right now, to keep some files in sync between the two, but not on my Mac. There may also be a way to keep the file in sync with .Mac; the challenge on that would be automating it on the Windows side, I think.