Professional ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX

16.8. Summary

Deploying ASP.NET AJAX applications is not considered to be overly complex, but there are some pitfalls to be avoided. This is made worse by the fact that development environments are typically different from the final production environment. Configuration changes are typically a necessary part of deployment. Attention to detail and being deliberate about avoiding problems can go a long way in ensuring that the performance and behavior of an application lives up to your expectation.

The Web Deployment project add-in for Visual Web Developer can help in automating a reusable process for moving from development into production. It allows for extensive customization for your unique environment and makes it easy to establish an environment where designers and developers collaborate to produce the application and the automated processes that are employed to move it into production reliably.

The increased use of JavaScript in developing rich Web applications brings some potentially interesting challenges. High-volume applications will need to be monitored and tuned for the absolute best performance. Coalescing script use to a single location for multiple applications can provide a performance benefit. Another potential win is to use the new ScriptManager feature for automatically coalescing several strips into a single client download.

For single applications that deploy to a cluster of Web servers, there are additional configuration concerns. Machine keys need to be synchronized, ...