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Silly but useful stuff - Part 5 (Web)

Reduce the data sent across the network  Reducing the amount of data sent across the network can improve application performance significantly. Compressing CSS and JavaScript is possible using bundling and minification. This will reduce the number of server requests and the amount of code sent across the wire.

Silly but useful stuff - Part 4 (Database)

As a developer you may or may not need to go into the database and write queries or design tables and indexes, or help determine configuration of your SQL Server systems. But if you do, these tips should help to make that a more pain free process.  a) Since the code generated from the ORM can frequently be ad hoc, ensure that the SQL Server instance has ‘Optimize for Ad Hoc’ enabled. This will store a plan stub in memory the first time a query is passed, rather than storing a full plan. This can help with memory management. b) Ensure your variables and parameters are the same data types as the columns. An implicit or explicit conversion can lead to table scans and slow performance. c) You get exactly one clustered index on a table. Ensure you have it in the right place. First choice is the most frequently accessed column, which may or may not be the primary key. Second choice is a column that structures the storage in a way that helps performance. This is a must for partitioning da

WPF: TemplateBinding with ControlTemplate

Today I'll try to write bit on TemplateBinding and how to use it inside a ControlTemplate . TemplateBinding is a type of binding used mainly for template scenarios. Here I am not going to write more on it's theoretical aspect as what is TemplateBinding, when to use, blah blah blah, as lot of content is readily available on net.  So, let's start quickly onto coding part: First of all, let's create a new project using WPF template and place a button in it as below: Now, what I am going to do is, I am going to replace this content template for this button. So, in order to do this, open up the Button tag and add Button.Template  markup tag with a new ControlTemplate as: Now as soon as you will add ControlTemplate tag, you will notice that the content of the button is gone and button is shown as a transparent rectangle. This is happened because here I told WPF to replace the default ControlTemplate with the one, which I defined. But at this point, our Co

ReLive TechEd

This weekend, I got a chance to attend an event 'ReLive TechEd' organised by very talented folks of B.Net and Microsoft community. This event goes for close to 5 hours and gives us the glance of latest Microsoft technologies. The most effective thing was that all the sessions were given by the professionals who actually presented in Microsoft TechEd 2013. This year I missed the TechEd, but I am very happy and thankful to B.Net team, who organized it back and that is also totally free of cost :) 

Windows Phone App Design Principles

Hope most of you might have heard DOUGLAS MARTIN's quote:           "Questions about whether design is  necessary or affordable are quite beside the point: Design is inevitable. The alternative to good design is bad design, not no design at all." And    VICTOR PAPANEK says:          "Design is the conscious effort to impose meaningful order" So, if designing is that much important then one has to be very much stern about it. Going forward, today I am pointing out some design principles for  Windows Phone App. So, let's gear up. Clutter free UI - Information should be well organized and user should not get congestion like feel. Make best use of typography Focus should be on content and it should be in a way that it attracts the user's attention from the beginning itself Try to keep only the most pertinent content on the screen because when it comes to WP design, content matters more than a chrome Try to provide seamless UX from dedicated devi

Windows Phone App' s Tip - Image consideration

Images play a very significant role in any Windows Phone application. So, one should be very careful while dealing with images. As of now, Windows Phone supports only two image formats named JPG/JPEG and PNG. Now before concluding on which image format to choose, let's get into bit more depth of it. PNG format images are non-lossy and need very little CPU effort to display because those are pixel perfect. But at the same time, huge PNG images take too much longer to read from storage and ultimately lead to slower display. On the other hand, JPEG format images are lossy, smaller to store  and based on the compression level much more complicated decoding algorithm is required to display them. Another point regarding image is about opacity and transparency -  All the images that use transparency should be stored as PNG format because JPEG doesn’t support transparency and JPEG format should be used for all the images that are fully opaque. Now when coming to Windows Ph

Silly but useful stuff - Part 3 (UI)

Importance of UI in performance Simple UI tricks, such as progress bars, redirecting user's attention using animation, or placing slower loading sections at the bottom of a page or off-screen, can often ‘fix’ a performance problem without the need to tune the underlying code. These UI tricks are an important tool to have in your performance tuning toolbox and can be much quicker and easier than addressing the underlying issue. They can act as a holdover until you have the time to devote to the core problem. So, one should never underestimate the UI while tackling performance issues. Isn't it interesting :)