Brendan Tompkins

September 2006 - Posts

• Speed Up VS 2005 Web Development - Kick your App_Code Habit

  Scott Guthrie talks about how to speed up build times for Visual Studio 2005.. It's a great read, and definitely something to know inside and out if you're doing ASP.NET development with VS 2005. You've got to hand it to a person in his position doing down and dirty blog posts to help us little guys out, from what I hear and from recent personal experience, he's very accessible. In his post about build performance, he actually has a good nugget of wisdom about overall performance of the IDE as well. He mentions this: Keep the number of files in your /app_code directory small.  If you end up having a lot of class files within this directory, I'd recommend you instead add a separate class library project to your VS solution and move these classes within that instead since class library projects compile faster than compiling classes using the /app_code directory.  This will speed build time, but will also speed up your design time experience as well.  Why you ask?  I recently spent some time on the phone with Bradley Bartz from MS, who explained this very slowly and patiently to me. I hope he'll let me know if this isn't right, but from my understanding, Every time you make a change to a file in the App_Code directory, this invalidates the Visual Studio's internal cache of classes in this folder. The very next time you try to open a designer for an ASPX page or ASCX control, VS has to re-compile this folder to get the metadata it needs for the design-time rendering of the control. This can cause the IDE to slow to a crawl.  One the classes are cached, things speed up significantly in the IDE. This was a big eye opener for me.  I'd been using the App_Code folder as an easy way to get a globally accessible class in my web projects. If it was stuff that only was related to the current web site, I felt this was a good choice for where to put the code.  The problem was, I was banging up against this slowness all the time. I'd get some class designed, tab over to a page or control to do some databinding and find myself waiting in frustration, my development rhythm shot. Little did I know that I was waiting on a compilation of the entire App_Code folder.  So, I'm going to seriously wean myself off of this folder, in favor of a separate dll project for these situations where I need a class to be visible across controls or pages. -Brendan Posted Sep 22 2006, 01:28 PM by Brendan Tompkins with 11 comment(s) Filed under: ASP.NET, Visual Studio

• Speed Up VS 2005 - Posts Coming Soon

  I've spent the past few days speaking with some folks at Microsoft about the problems I've been experiencing with VS 2005's performance. They've given me some great pointers and information about what's going on behind the scenes with VS that could be causing some slowness.  I'm going to spend the next few days eperimenting with some of their suggestions and will be posting about how your can speed up your development experience. Stay tuned...   Posted Sep 20 2006, 08:58 AM by Brendan Tompkins with 22 comment(s) Filed under: ASP.NET, Visual Studio

• A Little Self-Reflection...

  I had a conversation last week that made me think about my blogging... it gave me the idea for this cartoon: Posted Sep 18 2006, 07:23 AM by Brendan Tompkins with 3 comment(s)

• Why are ASP.NET Developers Jumping Ship?

  James Avery talks about Pete Wright leaving Microsoft I have a ton of respect for Pete and look forward to reading about his new experiences. I know more and more .NET developers who are playing around with RoR in their spare time, I wonder how many will convert over the next couple years? I too wonder how many ASP.NET developers will jump ship to RoR.  My interest has definitely been peaked, ever since I first saw that great Rails demo. Other than wondering how many will defect, I also wonder why ASP.NET developers are jumping ship.. Could it be that... VS.NET is no fun to use  Our IDE is currently in a fairly broken state (if you use VS 2005 for web development, you know what I'm talking about). I've taken to watching lots of Google Videos while I wait for builds, gets, controls to load, etc.  It's impossible to get a good web development rhythm going with the IDE currently.  Frankly, I think that this has been a major factor.  It's not something that's easy to put your finger on, but after months and months of mild frustration with development, playing with RoR is a lot more fun than playing with a new future MS technology. Perhaps SP1 will fix this?  Everything else currently released by MS is less than thrilling I'm talking about ASP.NET 2.0 and C# 2.0 here. With ASP.NET we've been handed a new project model with debatable benefit.  At least for me and my team, it's caused more problems than it's solved. Also, there's not much new to implement in our day to day coding.  Yes, we've been given some new controls, but these mostly solve problems that if you've been doing ASP.NET development for a while, you've already solved (membership, master pages, etc). So at best, a seasoned ASP.NET Developer is faced with the task of ripping out working code and replacing it. Whoohooo. Fun. The only thing I can say that's been given to me by MS in the last two years that I really use, saves coding time, and gives me warm fuzzies about MS are C# generics.   I know there's good stuff coming Now, I know there's good stuff on the horizon.  ATLAS, WPF, WCF to name a few.  Some very smart people over at CodeBetter seem to be very excited about these new things.  I for one can wait.  But this current state of things is giving me enough time to poke around with things like RoR.  If RoR can be compelling and fun enough, it's going to grab some converts.  MS better hurry up and throw us some bones.  -Brendan Posted Sep 15 2006, 06:25 AM by Brendan Tompkins with 43 comment(s) Filed under: ASP.NET, RoR, VS