http://www.dioramadesign.net/blog Notes on web application design using .NET and XHTML Tue, 01 May 2007 15:40:36 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en This week I spent some time with the excellent Jet Brains dotTrace Profiler, which allows you to see exactly how many milliseconds every method of your code is taking. I found the performance profiling quite easy to use, and within a few minutes I had already isolated a few problem areas ... http://www.dioramadesign.net/blog/optimizing-xsl-in-net-20/ In an earlier post, I mentioned how I use a piece of software called Rejoice to map events from a usb joystick/gamepad to midi notes.  This is so I can use a cheap usb video game joystick as a controller for audio software, for example changing pitch or tone by ... http://www.dioramadesign.net/blog/rejoice-midi-software/ In order to really push the efficiency of your ASP.NET application, I recommend using the HttpContext.Cache object for data that rarely changes. One thing I was experiencing with a high volume site was seemingly random errors to do with accessing cached objects. Consider the following simple example:if (HttpContext.Current.Cache["myObject"] != null) ... http://www.dioramadesign.net/blog/some-notes-on-httpcontextcache/ This is somewhat off my regular topic of .net programming, but still damn geeky: using the Nintendo Wii's remote as a virtual percussion instrument.  I'm not talking about banging it around as a drum stick! Read on and I'll explain.. I was one of the lucky ones to score ... http://www.dioramadesign.net/blog/using-the-wiimote-as-a-percussion-instrument/ I find the vast majority of documentation on using MSBuild to compile Visual Studio solutions is way too complicated.  MSBuild is very powerful, in that you can customize a lot of what is going on in the build process.  However, sometimes you just want to do a simple compile of ... http://www.dioramadesign.net/blog/msbuild-and-solution-files/ The other day I came across an article called Hacking Web 2.0 Applications with Firefox. This is a fantastic article for two reasons: It emphasizes just how little you should be trusting any client-side validation for ensuring the security of your web application. In other words, don't be ... http://www.dioramadesign.net/blog/fun-with-the-firebug-extension/ One fancy way to provide a bit of extra usability sugar on a form is to have formatting automatically applied to a textfield as the user types. I've been using a fantastic Mask Formatter javascript library created by PengoWorks for some time now on a number of production sites. This ... http://www.dioramadesign.net/blog/formatted-input-masks-for-textboxes/ Here's a quick little trick with the command line: consider a situation where you have a folder of .sql scripts that are used to update or create a new database. One way you can easily run all of these scripts against the database is by using the osql command ... http://www.dioramadesign.net/blog/osql-calling-sql-from-command-line/ In my first post in this series I showed an msbuild script that would create a Team Foundation Server source control workspace, get latest to a particular folder, and build the Visual Studio solution in one click. However, because of the fact that TFS v.1 does not allow shared workspaces, the ... http://www.dioramadesign.net/blog/tfs-msbuild-part-3-custom-msbuild-task/ This is an extension of my previous post on TFS and MSBuild. I have an msbuild script now that will do all of the grunt work of updating and compiling the code on a particular copy of our application. This can be easily called from the command line by overriding ... http://www.dioramadesign.net/blog/tfs-and-msbuild-part-2-batch-scripts/