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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

MSDN TV: Introduction to Indigo

MSDN TV: SQL Server Best Practices
Analyzer

MSDN turns off full text RSS

I know a lot of you read this site with a RSS aggreator. Heck I read 90% of the sites I review the same way. But I do know that some of you are running aggreators that poll us every hour. I have the spare bandwidth but apparently MSDN did not and those that have not throttled their aggreators where costing them a lot of money.

I only pull data twice a day once in the morning and once at night. So if you havent played with the scheduling of your polling make sure you save those sites with limited bandwidth some bandwidth charges by not pulling data hourly. [Scobleiz er]

WINDOWS XP SERVICE PACK 2 available @
MSDN

MSDN TV: Whiteboard with Anders
Hejlsberg

What Should Your Corporate Policy Be On
Blogs?

Many corporations, prodded by magazines like BusinessWeek talking up blogs as an important and enduring phenomenon, and by cases where companies have been embarrassed by employee blogs and responded by firing the employee, have been rushing to decide what, if anything, their policy on blogs should be. Such a policy needs to address: (a) employees' personal blogs that refer to or reflect in any way on their employer (b) 'official' corporate blogs (c) internal blogs on the corporate Intranet, and (d) reading blogs as part of business research Here's my unsolicited, cautious, and perhaps controversial advice to businesses considering such a policy, covering all four bases: Develop a knowledge-sharing policy that covers all information communications, not just blogs: Blogs are just the tip of the iceberg of of such extra-corporate communications, which are increasingly essential to relationship building and to the exchange of useful business information among organizations, employees, outside stakeholders and experts. But casual extra-corporate communications may inadvertently divulge confidential information, contravene the law, or embarrass the company. As the line between business and personal communications and relationships blurs more and more, your policy must draw the line clearly, with clear and specific examples of what is, and what is not, appropriate. That line must balance the advantages of open sharing of information against its risks. Respect employees' rights: Any behaviour that is inappropriate for an employee to do in any other circumstance or environment (e.g. betraying confidentiality, or holding the employer up to ridicule) is equally inappropriate on a blog. Your existingemployee conduct policy should therefore already cover unacceptable online behaviour. Beyond that, respect employees' rights to their own opinions, and have your legal counsel make sure that your corporate policy does not violate these rights. Dissing the boss and the company publicly may reflect poor judgement, and limit career advancement, but it's not legal grounds for dismissal or harassment. Understand that overstepping your legal grounds not only will get you into embarrassing court cases that will be PR disasters no matter the outcome, it will also drive the criticisms underground, onto anonymous blogs and discussion forums, and might drive some of your best employees out the door in the process. Insist that employees' personal blogs stress that that's what they are: Personal blogs should not carry the corporate logo (unless they're those of an executive specifically approved to do so) and if any mention of the employer is made (or is readily ascertainable) the blogger should make it clear that opinions expressed are not those of the employer. Don't have a policy on whether or not employees should or can have personal blogs: It's not your business, any more than anything else an employee does or doesn't do in their private life. Encouraging personal blogs is as paternalistic as prohibiting them. And counseling employees on matters of taste and discretion, or asking them to pre-clear content with you, is insulting and overstepping. Telling employees they can't blog on company time is redundant and offensive -- terms of employment should already cover this. With rare exceptions, don't have an 'official' company blog: Most people are skeptical of anything they read on official company sites, and that will usually negate any value they might have in making your company appear more personable and responsive to customers. Blogs are personal and casual. Most business communications are not. Be cautious and talk to your marketing people before proceeding. Don't forget, blogs are a significant time commitment to maintain, and a blog that is not frequently updated or not well maintained is worse than not having one at all. If you do decide to have a company blog, make sure you know who its intended audience is and that this intended audience is the group who will actually be reading your blog. Blogs (like other corporate websites) are more likely to attract potential recruits, alumni, competitors, potential allies and the media than customers. If your actual and intended audiences are very different, you're wasting your time -- and your readers'. Do experiment with blogs on the Intranet: Encourage at least the three groups who have the most to share (your company's subject matter experts, internal newsletter publishers and community of practice coordinators) and any individuals in the company who express enthusiasm in having an Intranet blog, to set one up. Use my 12-step program to manage your Intranet blog pilot. Encourage internal bloggers to focus their content on matters that others in the company will find of interest, such as the subjects in the illustration above. Evaluate the possibility of editing or repurposing the content of Intranet blogs for use on the public corporate website, but keep in mind point #5 above. Read blogs and encourage employees to do likewise: Find the blogs and blog posts that are most valuable to your organization, subscribe to their RSS feeds, and circulate them to others in the organization. Assign your researchers and reward employees for identifying and circulating useful articles from blogs, and for bringing to your attention online comments from customers and others about your company. Reading others' blogs can be useful to your company as a source of education, synopsis, analysis, competitive and customer intelligence. But don't over-invest in reading blogs either: Without focus, this can be a huge time-waster, and use caution when reacting to what you read, since blogs are often not well fact-checked, and they usually represent just one person's (often atypical) perspective. This advice is a lot less aggressive than what you may be hearing from either enthusiasts or detractors of the blogging phenomenon. But I think it's prudent for business not to over-react. Blogs are not going to single-handedly revolutionize business, nor do they pose new or significant threats to it. With the seven steps above, your company can explore blogs' opportunities, mitigate the risks, and take them in stride.

New Ideas, Data, and Analysis in
Communications Policy

fSONA Chief Scientist Assists NASA with
Mars Laser Communications

Constructing a Corporate Open Source
Policy?

Trend Micro OfficeScan Corporate Edition
offers broader security protection,
desktop policy enforcement

Align Communications Attains IP
Communications Specialization, Adds to
Staff

Corridor Communications Corporation
Signs Letter of Intent To Acquire the
Cable Television System Assets of Coast
Communications Inc.

OuterBay CFO to Present at National
Association of Corporate Directors
Conference on the New Corporate Governa

El Salvador�s communications service
providers generated $628m in fixed and
mobile communications service revenues
in 2003

Talking Policy: An examination of public
dialogue in science and technology
policy

The amount of office space that
corporations allocate to their libraries
has fallen by 8.36% over the past five
years, according to a new survey of
corporate libraries "Corporate Library
Benchmarks, 2004-05 Edition" ISBN:
1-57440-069-X.

Patriot Communications, a Toll-Free IVR
and interactive telecommunications
services. Patriot Communications
provides turn-key dealer locator, store
locator, recall information,
sweepstakes, job hotlines, instant win
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Get the 411 on Two-Way Communications

The Communications Project

Boku Communications

bokucom.com
track this site | 2 links

Level 3 Communications

DT Communications Engaged

CA to buy Concord Communications

Communications from beyond the grave

Echomine Muse Communications API 0.8a5

Cox Communications dives into VoIP

Cox Communications Returns to Profit in
1Q (AP)

8th WSEAS Int.Conf. on COMMUNICATIONS

3G communications to emerge in Russia

Sun names new communications exec

Internet Communications Engine 1.4.0

Wireless M2M Communications Forum

121 Communications - Vote121 Toolbar

vote121.com
track this site | 3 links

Fearsome Communications Commission

This Month's Top 10 Communications
Titles

New MSDN Blogs Website