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Just to share with you great news from Telerik – the VS 2010 support … take a look

Asp.Net team has released new updated of MS Ajax library that includes (As ScottGu stated):

• Better Imperative Syntax: A new, simplified, code syntax for creating client controls.

• Client Script Loader: A new client-side script loader that can dynamically load all of the JavaScript files required by a client control or library automatically, and executes the scripts in the right order.

• Better jQuery Integration: All Microsoft Ajax controls are now automatically exposed as jQuery plug-ins.

You can read more about it here.

If you take a closer look you can see that team has released new small tool called Microsoft Ajax Minifier which can be used to reduce the size of the javascript files. Ajax Minifier has the following components:

• ajaxmin.exe – A command-line tool for minifying JavaScript files.
• ajaxmintask.dll – A MSBuild task for minifying JavaScript files in a Visual Studio project.
• ajaxmin.dll – A component that you can use in your C# or VB.NET applications to minify JavaScript files.

Other optimization tools that you might try:

- Telerik RadCompression http://www.telerik.com/products/aspnet-ajax/compression.aspx

- Microsoft Ajax Minifier http://aspnet.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=34488

- MonoSoftware WAO http://www.mono-software.com/Pages/Web-Application-Optimizer.aspx

- Alachisoft nCache http://www.alachisoft.com/ncache/

Have you ever wonted more than one web site in IIS on Windows XP – Yes ? Here are few useful links that will explain how to accomplish this:

- Multiple Web Sites on One Machine

http://www.geoffchappell.com/viewer.htm?doc=notes/windows/iis/multiplewebsites.htm

- XP PRO IIS Admin 1.8.0: Managing multiple web sites on Windows 2000/XP Professional

http://www.jetstat.com/iisadmin/

Enjoy …

“The .NET Reflector 6 comes with a Visual Studio Add-in that lets you use Visual Studio's step-through-debugging on assemblies that you don't have the source code for.”

Source: http://www.red-gate.com/MessageBoard/viewtopic.php?t=9768

You can download the tool here:

http://downloads.red-gate.com/EAP/Reflector/Reflector_6.0.0.307_Deploy.zip

Microsoft ASP.NET team announced the Ajax CDN (Content Delivery Network) service that provides caching support for AJAX libraries. The service is available for free, does not require any registration, and can be used for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.

CDN is “Content delivery networks (CDNs) composed of "edge cache" servers that are strategically placed around the world at key Internet network points.  These "edge cache" servers can be used to cache and deliver all types of content – including images, videos, CSS and JavaScript files.” - ScottGu’s Blog.

You also need to know that this isn’t the first CDN on the market, course Google has it’s own CDN – Google CDN

The good thing

- MS Ajax CDN allows you to use enterprise infrastructure for free to speed up your web applications by referencing Ajax scripts from CDN. So basically you just need to put few links inside your web application and you are set to use CDN.

- The requests are much faster than the requests to your web server

- You can lower you bandwidth by using CDN

- In .Net 4.0 CDN will be built-in with ScriptManager

The “bad” thing

- At the moment there is a small amount of script available at CDN

- It is unclear how script / resource version changes will be handled, so if reference to the script is changed you may end up with no reference (404) or changed reference that may have different methods, method signatures etc. (Maybe some of below links has detailed explanation about this issue)

Also you can checkout these links:

- ScottGu’s Blog post - Announcing the Microsoft AJAX CDN

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/09/15/announcing-the-microsoft-ajax-cdn.aspx

- Speed test - Microsoft's CDN vs Google's CDN

http://www.timacheson.com/Blog/2009/sep/microsoft_launches_ajax_content_distribution_network#comment82

If you ever encountered a slow initial web application loan (for the first user accessing the web application), if you are a asp.net developer you probably have, you may want to take a look at ScottGu’s blog post. One of the new ASP.NET 4 features is the ability to automatically startup and proactively initialize a web application without having to wait for an external client to hit the web server.

In my opinion the down side of this feature is that it is not a .Net 4 only feature but you need to use it in combination with IIS 7.5 (which ships with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2). So basically you can’t install / use this feature on older web servers :( …

There are many settings that you can use to tweak this feature such as “startMode” (AppPool), “serviceAutoStartProvider” etc. which are explained here.