Ok, so this is my third blog post today. Gotta be a record for me I think.

On Tuesday I will be presenting on the topic of performance optimization at Swenug in Göteborg. This last year I have been working quite a lot with this focus at Admeta. The topic of this talk is: 1 billion web request - response time 50 milliseconds. This is actually not a lie since we have these types of requirements at Admeta. One billion request is quite a high number so I do understand if there is a mild hesitation if it really can be true. But asynchronous requests from multiple high load pressure web sites can stimulate this type of requirements, trust me.

I believe the presentation will be approximately 2 hours, but there will be room for some discussions. I've been at a number of Swenug presentations by now here in Göteborg and I think the atmosphere is very relaxed and nice. I hope for the same nice athmosphere on Tuesday with lots of interesting questions and discussions. So this is what I planed and prepared for my presentation:

1. Load testing process and demonstration

Load testing is of vital importance in order to understand how the load pressure will affect your web site. Scaling with more machines is not always something that you can do hastily if the need arises and it sure does cost a lot of money to do it. So it's good to know a little of what you application could behave in production before you launch it. In this part I will go through the load testing procedure, what to look out for, what data to collect, and give various other hints based upon my experience in the area.

2. Performance Profiling with the Running Mate application

For profiling och optimising, I will demo with a new hobby application that I just recently built: The Running Mate. The special thing about this application is that I have built the domain very loosely coupled with regards to the application layer making it possible to switch the domain layer at runtime. I am basically providing these different types of implementations:

a) The Super Hack: this was the running mate application as easy as I could possibly implement it. Not much design work. But fast?

b) The Overkill Design: This application is a bit overkill since the domain model is interchangeable in runtime. I would say that in most cases, this is not how you would normally decouple the domain layer since the need for it often just isn't there. However, it is very useful if you would like to profile performance with regards to different types of domain model implementations. The architecture pattern is that one of the Domain Driven Design (as described by Eric Evans) which gives the system a very nice Separation of Concern I think. One of the provided domain models is using a traditional Data Access Layer implemented in DDD repositories. The other provided domain model is using the Mindscape LightSpeed O/R mapper which we have used at Admeta for quite some time. As you can see in the link it is providing a bunch of nice features and it is very nicely DDD oriented.

So, I think there is enough substance here for a two hour session with discussion. All code demonstrated during the evening will be provided at CodePlex at http://www.codeplex.com/runningmate very soon.

Wow! Emabarrasing. I didn't realize it was almost a year since I made a promise to keep writing in my blog... Ok. Now I make a new promise, here and now: to never make any promises about writing in my blog. That's definitely a more easy one to keep. Allthough I do actually have a lot of subjects piled up that I want to write about and I hope that I can get started at it in november. But that's not a promise..

I have just spoken about Model View Controller at Pimp My Code that Cornerstone arranged. Yesterday in Stockholm and today in Gothenburg, Sweden. It was a great event and my brain is boiling down all the impressions I got during these two days, Both from hearing the other, in my opinion, excellent speakers but also just from the atmosphere during those two days. Hopefully I will get to do this again.

Anyway, I did promise to hand out my code demos in my blog and here they are: MVC demos.7z (167,42 KB).
(Download 7-zip here). I was worried for a while since out of convenience I placed the SQL Express server database (files) in all projects that needed it. Well, the database had a size of about 2 MB (although very little content) which rendered a total size of about 23 MB.. But 7zip did an amazing compressing job so I think I am home free.

Now, some words about the demos. I did write them all this weekend and rather hastily. I did do some refactoring as I created the next demo and so on, but I did not bother to clean up the old ones. But the total code mass is so small as it is so that should be no problem to you. Also, I wanted the demos as clean and simple as possible in order to demonstrate different aspects and flavours of Model View Controller. Hopefully I did manage this. Although I do admit I would have liked to tidy the code a bit. But what the heck. Enjoy or destroy.

Nevertheless, feel free to contact me if you have any question about something. My name is tobias.fjalling and I work at dotway.se. I think you can figure out the rest.

Here my powerpoint slides too: MVC.pdf (0,4 MB)

PS. I just gotta do something abour this crappy blog GUI of mine. This is embarrasing too...

Last week, the Öredev 2006 conference took place. I though it was a great event and I listen too many interesting speakers. I'll probably get back to write some reflections on some of the sessions in later blog posts.  My own workshop session took place last Tuesday and I was assitested with Göran Halvarsson at Dotway for this session. I thought the workshop went fine although I have'nt taken part of the workshop evaluations just yet..  As I been writing previously, the workshop was based on the ASP.NET AJAX July CTP rather than the newly released beta 2 version.  Not that it mattered that much I though since the concepts are the same.

I just sent the workshop labs and the instructions for the walkthroughs to Michael Tiberg, the project leader of Öredev, so they should be dowloadable from the Öredev website soon.  However, I've put in a lot of effort to convert the labs into the beta 2 syntax. This is quite cumbersome since much of the client control documentation still is missing at the ajax.asp.net web site. I'm almost done however, and I promise I will write about my endevaours with this matter in a future blog post.

I've been so tuned in lately on upgrading a .NET introduction course for Dotway, the company I work for, that I've totaly missed out on the ASP.NET AJAX beta 1 release that occured the 20^th of October. Feeling a bit embarassed about this I'm currently catching up on the news also in this release. As always, Scott Guthrie writes a spendid summary of the features in his blog. A lot of the features I found new in the beta 2 release yesterday apparantly were already there in the beta 1 release. Ohh, and sure, Scott writes an exellent summary on the beta 2 release as well.

So I'll be using my weekend to look through the changes that have been made, especially considering the Öredev AJAX workshop comming up on Tuesday. Yippidiye! 

This is kind of a late notice, but on Tuesday the 10th of May, I will be holding a brief ASP.NET 2.0 presentation in Malmö, Sweden at the company I for: Dotway. A collegue of mine is also presenting Windows Forms 2.0. If you understand Swedish :~) and if you are interested you are much welcome. You can read more about it here.