WCF Performance Counter Sizing - Do the Math
Performance counters for WCF have been available ever since the first release of WCF with the .NET 3.0 Framework. As long as these counters have been available, Microsoft has been cautioning about the memory requirements and potential performance degradation associated with insufficient shared memory allocation. I thought that I had heard at the PDC that WCF 4 would fix some of this but going back to the WCF session video, it looks as if these counters won’t really be addressed by WCF 4 but instead superseded by the ETW instrumentation present in AppFabric. So, until everyone moves to AppFabric, I see a need for a bit more guidance than the “allocate enough memory” that Microsoft offers us.
Redgate Reflector Pro
As many of you likely know, Lutz Roeder turned over control of one of the “must have” .NET developer tools, .NET Reflector to Red Gate software. True to their promise, RedGate has continued to support the free version of Reflector and make continued improvements, including the addition of a Visual Studio plugin to jump into Reflector and the support of .NET 4 assemblies with their most recent release of the tool.
Lightweight, Aspect-Oriented Instrumentation with PostSharp, NLog, and SQLite
How would you like to achieve detailed exception and trace logging, including method timing and correlation all within a lightweight in-memory database that you can easily manage and query, as exhibited below?
Watch Out! .NET Web Services and the XML Serializer
Sometimes you know that something works a certain way but you haven’t really internalized it, you haven’t grok’ed it, until you experience it firsthand. Such was my knowledge of the interaction between .NET web services and the XML Serializer a couple of weeks ago.
Book Review: Ultra-Fast ASP.NET
I picked up this gem of a book when it first came out in eBook format during the PDC. I sent it over to my Kindle and got through the entire book during session downtimes. I planned on being the first to post a review of this book on Amazon but I’ve sat it out too long and will now be the fifth review.
SQLite and .NET - Agility Tips and Tricks
For quick and easy prototypes, you’ve got to admire ASP.NET MVC and WCF RIA Services. These approaches may not be perfect out-of-the-box but they’re structured much better than the old “bind a dataset to a grid and let it fly” approach of 2003. As easy as these approaches are, I’m always looking for ways to make things easier. I get a lot of bang for my buck by using SQLite as an in-memory database whenever I create a new MVC or RIA Services solution. In fact, I create 4 SQLite databases with each new solution: one each for application data, test data, membership/role data, and logging/tracing data. Below I’ve described the techniques I make use of to utilize each of these databases.
Microsoft Service and Integration Technologies - WCF 4.0, AppFabric, BizTalk 2010
One of the things I’m often asked to do for clients is to create an applicability matrix. That is, which technology applies best to which particular challenges in an enterprise? There would seem to be an acute need for this type of clarification in the realm of Microsoft’s service technologies. With the recent releases of Web Process Activations Services (WAS) on Windows Server 2008, WCF 3.5 and 4.0, Windows Server AppFabric, BizTalk 2009 and 2010, and Windows Azure AppFabric, the waters of Microsoft’s service and integration technologies is muddy indeed. In this post, I’m going to provide some clarification; explaining what new service and integration offerings are on the way from Microsoft, offering a frame of reference on how I see them applying to enterprise customers, and furnishing references to materials you can use to educate yourself in these technologies.
PowerBuilder and .NET
I’ve had the opportunity to spend the last week or so investigating a system integration challenge involving PowerBuilder and .NET communicating with web services hosted on a mainframe. It’s been an interesting experience that’s enabled me to dive deep into .NET and to learn a bit about where PowerBuilder is at and where it’s heading. My outtakes follow:
WCF Concurrency and Instancing
I’ve been ranting to some colleagues about a particularly useful table that showed the interactions between WCF’s InstanceContextMode and ConcurrencyMode behaviors. I referenced it in a conversation again today and decided that I needed to go hunt down the phantom table so that it haunted me no longer.
Logging to SQLite with NLog
This is one of those seemingly trite blog entries – unless you’re actually trying to integrate System.Data.SQLite with NLog, in which case it’s invaluable. SQLite and NLog really are the perfect combination for lightweight logging. You avoid the sprawl of file-based logs over time, can execute SQL queries against your logs and have an absolutely minimal database footprint to deal with. If only you can get the configuration correct…