Deploying WCF to IIS Server 7.5

I had to take few minutes to figure out how to deploy Virtual Applications, etc in IIS 7.5 . For me, deploying web applications and services in IIS 5 and 6 is easy, but maybe Microsoft did something new in IIS 7, that can improve the way we develop in .NET technologies.

Web Optimizations in a shared hosting environment

One of my hosted site receives concurrent visitors, and eventually goes down in few seconds. I never thought that it would be that bad, when most of the websites/web applications I've done runs smoothly in web servers where I deployed it. Just how many application pools are running in that shared server? Probably, hundreds? I tried to check for the specs, but unfortunately Diagnostics classes are prevented due to security policies (clients might close their site hosting from them if they realize that the server is crappy).



The biggest challenge here is to optimize everything. Instead of an object mapper, I'll just have the database return specific records, and perform minimal manipulation. Use limited variables and trim everything by size. ( I think that server runs approx 1MB - 100MB RAM for my application pool).


The page loads faster now, though still cant survive the slashdot effect.

Problem with IE

On my recent web development, I've decided to implement XML+XSLT to save some server processing to render HTML contents. Also, I'm considering this for future maintenance, if ever I would need to change the layout, I'll simply change the XSL templates.The next time xml pages are loaded using that XSL transform file, the browser will not download it anymore and simply apply the transform locally. This also has the benefit of making information reusable. Since the information is already available as an XML document, anyone can simply make a Webrequest to a page URL, convert the stream into an XmlDocument, and information is there. I also decided to monitor all file request on my website. This is to get all site activity as much as possible,and make it invisible to user without specifying additional variables (session, querystring, form, viewstate or cookie).

I've tested this on FF, Chrome and IE9. Got it working, but when I tried it on IE 8, it made me sad that IE8 strips UrlReferrer of XSLT file. (other files do have their UrlReferer btw).

I can't make a big step to decide and assume that all visitors of my site won't be using IE8 or below. I think IE is still the most used browser, and it was already a fact. And another depressing fact is that, to install Internet Explorer 9, you need to upgrade to a more recent version of Windows *cough* 7. Yes,

IE9 is only available to Windows 7.

 Now, this has been an issue with Web Developers. Flash or Javascript? How many users would install or upgrade their Flash version just to have everything on your website rendering OK? I don't want to think that, I can have few visitors to install Windows 7 for me and have them use IE9.

Beware of Credit Card Scams used in Fitness Gyms

I didn't cared much about this until later when I got my Credit card charged with un-Authorized transactions. To share this, I enrolled to a Fitness Gym. At first, I was hesitant to use my credit card but with good salestalk, I was blinded by the freebies provided for those who will register, and also avail their promo. Then, after I got everything OK, I was approached by one of their staff. I was told that there are other members who want to join, but don't have a credit card. So, this staff explained to me that they just need some credit card to be registered with their registration, so they can avail their promo but no charges will be sent to my credit card, as it will be nullified on purpose (Was explained to me that, they will just charge 1 peso and cancel the transaction, so no charges will be sent.). I'm just tired and really want to call it a day, so I said, OK but be sure that I won't have any trouble with this, which the staff expressively said "yes, absolutely no problem!".

Frustration in XML+XSLT

Had a hard time developing my site. One of doubting challenge would be SEO. We all know (ok, maybe not really), that a site is friendly to search engines when contents can be "somehow" readable to the search engine crawlers. The site I'm making now is not for a popular brand that people already know. So, every web crawler's effort is appreciated.

If we send the data thru XML, we are sending the raw information using our own format. Google, Yahoo or Bing won't know that a text I've enclosed with some name tags is for, other than it is a readable text, something that can be matched with related informations.

So, the present that XML data to a human user, we have to transform it HTML that the browsers can understand, using XSLT. During testing, I have noticed that the browser caches few files, which made me conclude that, it really does save bandwidth problems for high-traffic sites.

 Added up with HTML5 (which gives me some real pain in the neck, thanks to stubborn as ever, IE), it is possible to make cool web UIs. I already up'ed the site, and will see in weeks how the contents result in major search engine results.