ASP.NET 2.0 Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Introduction

Performance has been a concern of ours throughout this book, and we have endeavored to provide you with production-ready code that will perform well in any setting. And when a recipe involves trade-offs between performance and ease of implementation, we strive to bring these to your attention. Nevertheless, when an application is not performing as well as you would like, you can improve matters by altering its handling of the following elements:

ViewState

You can often improve a page’s performance by disabling the ViewState for the page or some of its controls, but you have to be aware of the consequences.

String concatenation

You’ve probably heard that it is better to use the StringBuilder object to build strings rather than the classic concatenation operators (& and +). But you may be wondering how much better it is and if it applies to your situation.

Data access

With the different options available for data access, ways to improve data access performance exist, especially when choosing between the two primary methods for reading data from a database—i.e., via a DataReader or a DataAdapter.

SQL Server managed provider

For the sake of database interoperability, the bulk of the recipes in this book show how to access data using the OleDB managed provider. Yet because of the performance that can be garnered, much can be said for using the SQL Server managed provider instead when you know the application will always access SQL Server 7.0 or later.

All of these topics ...