Matias Woloski’s Blog

Last week, June 4th, together with Pablo Costantini (a coworker specialist on web technologies) we delivered a presentation about high performance websites at the local MIX event. There is a well known book from Steve Souders, former Chief Performance Officer of Yahoo! called High Performance Web Sites and we based the presentation on it, and also showed how to implement the rules using Microsoft technlogies (ASP.NET in particular)

The attendees gave us good feedback saying that the presentation was pragmatic and straight to the point.

In my opinion, this book and the tips we gave are things we usually oversee in web applications that can really make a difference on user experience. We achieved 40-50% of response time reduction by applying them and the effort is virtually zero.

Feel free to reuse the deck and the demo that are published here.

This post announces an event for the spanish talking community

El martes 13 de Mayo, con mi amigo experto en ASP.NET MVC, Juan Pablo Garcia, vamos a dar una introducción al nuevo framework de 45 minutos. Usaremos el Preview 2 y durante la presentacion haremos una demo que abarca la mayor parte de los conceptos nuevos de ASP.NET MVC.

Se pueden registrar aca: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032376090&EventCategory=4&culture=es-AR&CountryCode=AR

For those who don’t have VS 2008 yet, I created the VS 2005 templates

You will get two kind of solution/project templates (the same you get for VS 2008)

The MVC framework uses anonymous types extensively (for instance when you add Routes and set Defaults values for the route segments). You can see I provided an MvcDefaults class in the template which contains common properties like controller, action and id. You can either use that approach or install support for C# 3.0 in VS 2005.

Download ASP.NET MVC Visual Studio 2005 Templates (VSI format)

Enjoy!

I’m in the early stages of writing my thesis about SaaS. As
part of this process I’m reading loads of SaaS content. Mainly, I’m monitoring Gianpaolo Carraro and Fred Chong blogs (from
the Microsoft Architect Strategy group) and a weekly SaaS newsletter.

SaaS is
in its infancy in terms of guidance and realization and as a result, my
thesis outline consists of analyzing the state of the art and fulfills the architectural
concepts by writing a reference implementation of Software as a Service using
Microsoft technologies (WinFx, ASP.Net 2, etc.).

Fred and Gianpaolo wrote a great paper that has been
published on MSDN about architectural
strategies for SaaS.

The paper starts by talking about the business value proposition of SaaS. Leveraging
economy of scale and selling for the long tail are really attractive concepts.

The other half of the paper examines architectural implications
when adopting this model: the SaaS maturity level, metadata services,
multi-tenant and scale out among other things.

This paper is a first approach on the subject and it introduces
concepts like Metadata Services which I found one of the key challenges
to fulfill in terms of guidance because it is a cross-cutting concern in SaaS
architectures.

The following is my first approach on how I would like to achieve
Metadata Services using the Microsoft stack.

I would like to make a special comment on “Extensions to
the data model”. In the previous months we, at Southworks, customized extensively the
process template of VSTS
to fit our needs. This customization has been really straightforward and it
allowed tailoring our specific requirements not only for our SDLC but also on
other business processes. That proved us that XML succeeded as a metadata
language. The guys from VSTS did a great job by providing these metadata
services and I would like to explore more the intrinsic of it.

How many times you wanted to reuse asp.net artifacts like usercontrols, or even pages? Dan Wahlin posted to the aspadvice.com list regards this issue. He wanted to reuse a master page accross different websites (hosted on different vdirs).
I’ve recommended him reading this post from ScottGu
and he got working a first version. The idea is to sign and publish the
website and put it on the GAC. Then on the website that you want to reuse create an empty
masterpage and make it inherits from the GAC masterpage class. The
entire post can be read here.

I couldn’t agree more with this post from Andres Aguiar. The model for databinding in Winforms 2 was greatly enhanced with BindingSource, BindingNavigator and cia. However the intermediaries controls in ASP.Net 2 are not useful at all. I see them only used on very simple scenarios with a very simple
business layer or in a prototypes for the case of SqlDatasource. I’m
sure this is very useful for people doing small applications that like
development ala MS Access drag n drop, but for enterprise scenarios
these controls are a big no. I hope to see some new *DataSource
controls that addresses these issues.