July 2008 Blog Posts
Over the years, all the way back to the ASP 2.0 days, elegantly handling the Query String parameters between gets has been a challenge. With Web Forms for ASP.NET View State put this issue on the backburner, but with MVC on the rise and restful applications becoming hot, Query String parameters have come back to the forefront.
For an example of where the Query String parameters can get cumbersome, consider a web page which lists products. At the least the page would have paging support, most sites with paging by query string parameters (something like "?page=1"). ...
Windows Vista has been taking a lot of heat, and many ask why go to Vista when XP works so well. One of the most compelling reasons to move to Vista for myself is Internet Information Services (IIS) 7. With Service Pack 1 for Vista the same kernel is used as that for Windows Server 2008. So with Vista you have IIS 7 running under the same kernel as Server 2008. The only limitation to IIS 7 running under Vista is that it will only return a finite number of simultaneous requests (3 for the basic...
The windows server 2003 performance advisor, http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=09115420-8c9d-46b9-a9a5-9bffcd237da2&displaylang=en, was recently (7/3/2008) updated. It's a great tool for analyzing servers and determining when you might need to scale it out. It can track major counters over time and provide recommendations relating to performance. If you have thresholds for your web applications this will give you a great idea when to scale out.
Overview
Microsoft ® Windows Server ™ 2003 Performance Advisor is the latest version of Server Performance Advisor, which is a simple but robust tool that helps you diagnose the root causes of performance problems in a Microsoft Windows Server 2003...
I came across a great article on MSDN discussing various scaling options for SQL Server 2005, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479364.aspx. The article does a great job at relating data types and how they relate to scaling choices. The take away is that scaling choice is highly dependent on how the data is used by the application.
For more information regarding the Peer-to-Peer scheme, this article is also a great reference for some design considerations http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc160974(TechNet.10).aspx.
Table 1. Factors influencing the selection of scaleout solutions
Update FrequencyAbility to Change ApplicationData PartitionabilityData CouplingScalable Shared DatabasesRead Only.Little or no change required.No requirement.No requirement.Peer-to-Peer ReplicationRead mostly, no conflicts.Little...