MSDN Forums Beta

MSDN: The Quest for ASP.NET Scalability

At the height of the dot-com boom in the mid-1990's, many companies burst onto the scene as Application Services Providers (ASPs) hoping to capitalize on the wave of Internet success stories, and rake in some loot. Aside from the unfortunate market collapse that followed, ASPs had other issues to deal with such as training staff to effectively build and manage a secure, reliable and highly available operation.

Today, Web-enabling architecture is prevalent, particularly since Web services have become a staple for most applications, and the growing pains of ASPs past are feeding businesses everywhere with a hunger for successful implementations for 24x7 applications. As Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) themes spread across organizations, applications are now reaching wider audiences than ever before. Gone are the days where you can sling some code, ship product, and cross your fingers.

The key points that i see addressed in this article:

1. You need to be able to handle long-running jobs, and you can do that by storing the job in a queue to be handled later by a background process. In the PHP world, this can be implemented by storing a queue of jobs in a database table or shared memory. Then you have a background process monitoring this table for new jobs to run.

2. Distributed processing to spread the load. COM+ is discussed. In PHP, we could use XML-RPC or SOAP to work with a set of distributed servers.

3. And when you have distributed processing, you might need to synchronize distributed transactions. This is something that's difficult to implement in PHP, and it is probably best to structure your design to allow only a single master software to perform data synchronization, instead of allowing multiple masters.

   For example, in the typical PHP-distributed MySQL scenario, you would have one single master database which you write to, and multiple read-only slave databases to which the changes are replicated to.

MSDN Blog Bits

• Ego Shooter in 96kb

  Peter Koen writes:
  Beta 1 of kkrieger, an ego-shooter doom3 like game in 96kb has been released this weekend:
  This games needs DirectX 9.0, and a high-end graphicscard (Pixelshaders)! Everything has been done with Visual C++ and x86 Assembler!
  
  Take note that the game requires Pixel Shaders 1.3 to run.
  System requirements listed are:
  

  • A 1.5GHz Pentium3/Athlon or faster.
  • 512MB of RAM (or more)
  • A Geforce 4 Ti (or higher) or ATI Radeon 8500 (or higher) graphics card supporting pixel shaders 1.3, preferably with 128MB or more of VRAM.
  • Some kind of sound hardware
  • DirectX 9.0b

• Paranoia

  As noted in a previous "blogsicle", I have a strange habit of wasting countless hours browsing Slashdot comments, alternating between abject horror and mild amusement at the outlandish things people post there.
  
  Two things that are said time and time again about Windows are:
  
  1) In Windows, you have to run as Administrator.
  
  2) In Windows, every file is executable if it has the right extension.
  
  The first claim is of course completely bogus. For better or worse, Windows makes people Administrators by default (otherwise, how would they install software, set the system time, add other users, etc?) but that doesn't mean you have to stay that way. I have been running as a "Normal User" (not even "Power User") for quite some time now (over a year?) on Windows XP with very few problems. Sure, it's a bit of a pain that I have to use RUNAS when I want to go to Windows Update and install a patch, but day to day it does not interrupt my routine. I can browse the web, use Microsoft Office applications, build apps with Visual Studio .NET, play music, and do pretty much whatever I want without any issues.

• Debugger Visualizers on VS 2005 Community Tech Preview

  As promised, an updated Visualizers How-To! My last how-to entry on Visualizers was targeted at the PDC release of Whidbey, as you may (or may not) remember. This time I don't feel the need to cringe at times as I describe the process. :0)
  
  First, a high level overview of Visualizers. Visualizers allow for advanced, customized viewing of data while debugging. Today's data windows have their limitations; text-only, hierarchical, spatially constrained - not the best for viewing an image, for example. Visualizers allow you to create completely custom views using WinForms to best show the data within any managed object. Yes, unfortunately this feature will only available for the managed world.

• UML and DSLs Again

  I’m often asked by audiences, visitors to Microsoft and journalists to explain our position with respect to UML (e.g. VSLive! Interview). Many people who read our views on model driven development, as described in these postings and other places, assume that our emphasis on domain specific (modeling) languages, or DSLs, somehow has put us into an anti-UML position. We want to make it clear that this is not true. While I laughed out loud at some points in Alex Bell’s excellent article in March 2004 ACM Queue called Death By UML Fever, we still agree with many of the points made by Grady Booch in his response. Before UML, there was an unproductive diversity of modeling approaches, and their convergence into UML 1.0 was a significant step forward in using models in software development.

Future MSDN Improvements

New MSDN Support Area

MSDN Product Feedback

Microsoft bl0ggers come to MSDN

ADVERTISEMENT:

Get strong 128-bit SSL security for your online business - To secure your servers with 128-bit SSL encryption, download a copy of the free VeriSign Guide, "Securing Your Web site for Business." You'll learn everything you need to know about encrypting e-commerce transactions, securing corporate intranets, and authenticating your Web site.

MSDN TV: J# Browser Controls

MSDN TV: Introduction to Indigo

MSDN: A Look Back and a Look Ahead

Channel 9 MSDN Route 64

C&W readies managed VoIP service

SQLite WinCE Port

Windows Longhorn Client Preview For MSDN
Subscribers

Longhorn Preview

Microsoft's Longhorn gets Irish preview

No public Longhorn preview, says MS -
developers only

WinHEC Longhorn Build Technical Preview

Live for Speed S2 pre-Alpha preview

Microsoft: NAP Coming in Longhorn Client

More Longhorn Client Pieces Fall Into
Place

WinFS Axed From Longhorn Client and
Server

Microsoft: Network Security Coming in
Longhorn Client

Microsoft Aligns Longhorn Client, Server
(PC World)

Microsoft aligns Longhorn client and
server work

Microsoft Announces 2006 Target Date for
Broad Availability Of Windows "Longhorn"
Client Operating System

"Microsoft Announces 2006 Target Date
for Broad Availability Of Windows
Longhorn Client Operating System"

Zizasoft Releases zsCompare 2.0 –
Featuring Advanced Text Comparison and
Enhanced Folder Comparison and
Synchronization Functionality

Intel touts Celeron M for WinCE

MS expands WinCE 5.0 'shared' source
licence

VoIP "Purity"

I picked up this post from Mr Blog via Kevin Werbach.  It's an interesting post, which argues that the recent spate of VoIP announcements from various established teleco's was a bit of a sham, because in reality these rollouts (and those from "pure play" Internet Telephony Service Providers (ITSPs) such as Vonage and VoiceStream) merely bridge between IP and the Plain Old Telephone Systems (POTS).

But I think this is a relatively narrow, short-term perspective.  Just as mobile and wireline teleco's have built out interchange, connectivity and roaming agreements on the wireless and circuit-switched networks, they are doing the same on the Internet.  For example, Vonage, VoiceStream and others already have interchange agreements with Free World Dialup, where all of the voice traffic is routed over IP.  As these established carriers launch standards-based (SIP) VoIP service, they will likely move aggressively to enable SIP-SIP signalling gateways that drives all traffic over the IP network -- it's in everyone's advantage to do this, even established carriers, where this yields much lower core operating costs, and net new revenue streams from additional potential services (as Mr Blog points out well in his piece).

This is also one reason why services such as Skype, while offering P2P-based VoIP sessions, fail to interest me in substantial form --- because they are not standard's based, they will not be able ot as easily participate in the network effects that will occur when islands and SIP users can communicate.  Because I definately want a voice/video service that includes supporting my traditional analog wirelines phones and my mobile phone, I'm not going to move to a system that is outside the signalling sphere of traditional telephony networks, but do want one where I can leverage P2P connections using SIP proxies and gateways to find the peers.  I imagine this baseline "service" will be dirt-cheap (e.g. $5-10/month), whereas POTS and Wireless interop will cost more, as well as additional value-added services (e.g. various forms of call control, video, etc.).

Purity Of Email -P.O.E.

Libertarian Purity Test

bcaplan.com/cgi/purity.cgi
track this site | 10 links

The Myth of .NET Purity, Reloaded

Nerd Purity Test

armory.com/tests/nerd.html
track this site | 4 links

"Libertarian Purity Test"

Pure Restoration // Restore Purity

purerestoration.com
track this site | 4 links

Law on Pizza Purity a Mouthful (Reuters)

Dell scorns high-tech purity, taps
technology of others

10 Goto 10: MT-Preview: WYSIWYG
Preview Mode for Movable Type

laurentm.com/10Goto10/archives/movable_type/000086.html
track this site | 4 links

Introducing "Longhorn" for Developers:
Create Mobility-Aware "Longhorn"
Applications

SQLite-DB-0.02

MSDN Managed Newsgroups