My article on “Essential IT Admin skills for .NET Developers” is published on DNC .NET Magazine May 2013 issue. Please subscribe to this FREE magazine at: http://www.dotnetcurry.com/magazine/

My talk at London AJAX User group on some performance optimization techniques that can give a javascript rich Single Page Application big boost in terms of page load performance. See the lecture here: http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/ajax-ria/7-real-life-lessons-learnt-from-a-single-page-application/mh-6922 Here are the slides.
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My talk at London .NET User Group on couple of essential skills every .NET developer should have under their belt before going live. If you are a startup or a developer who has to code, deploy and maintain .NET apps on production, you will find these techniques very handy. http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/design-architecture/10-it-admin-skills-every-dot-net-developer-should-have-before-going-live/mh-6871 Watch the video at Skills [...]
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Custom fonts are widely used nowadays to give your websites trendy look, but at the great expense of page loading speed. Each custom font has to be downloaded, initialized and applied throughout the page before browser can render anything. If you have a custom font in any CSS, anywhere on the page, most browsers (like [...]
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Here’s my talk on my Open Source project Droptiles, which replicates the Windows 8 Start UI on the web using HTML 4, JS, CSS 2. I have given an walkthrough on how to use Twitter Bootstrap to create modern looking UI. Then how to use KnockoutJS to build a web applicatoin following the Model-View-ViewModel pattern. [...]
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Droptiles (http://droptiles.com) is a Windows 8 Start like Metro style Web 2.0 Dashboard. It builds the experience using Tiles. Tiles are mini apps that can fetch data from external sources. Clicking on a tile launches the full app. Apps can be from any existing website to customized website specifically built to fit the Dashboard experience. Droptiles is built almost entirely of HTML, Javascript and CSS and thus highly portable to any platform. The sample project is built using ASP.NET to show some server side integration, like Signup, Login and getting dynamic data from server. But with very little change you can port it to PHP, Ruby, JSP or any other platform. Droptiles is the sequel of my Dropthings, which is the first Open Source Web 2.0 Dashboard.

Codeuml.com is a web based UML designer where you code the diagram using a special language and it generates the diagram on the fly. It is faster than using any visual designer where you have to drag & drop diagram elements and use mouse to connect them. Codeuml uses the open source plantuml engine to [...]

When you use WCF services from Javascript, you have to generate the Javascript proxies by hitting the Service.svc/js. If you have five WCF services, then it means five javascripts to download. As browsers download javascripts synchronously, one after another, it adds latency to page load and slows down page rendering performance. Moreover, the same WCF [...]

Here’s an implementation of MemoryStream like buffer manager where one thread can write and many threads can read simultaneously. Each reading thread gets its own reader and can read from the shared stream on its own without blocking write operation or other parallel read operations. It supports blocking Read call so that reader threads can [...]

When you are reading data from a binary stream, like NetworkStream or FileStream and you need to read both binary chunks as well as read one text line at a time, you are on your own as BinaryReader nor Stream supports ReadLine. You can use StreamReader to do ReadLine, but it does not allow you [...]

Here’s the recent presentation made on LIDNUG on scaling ASP.NET websites from thousands to millions of users. Scaling ASP.NET websites from thousands to millions of users by Omar AL Zabir Here’re the slides. Scaling asp.net websites to millions of users

Internet is full of flash ads nowadays that make page load slower, render slower and consumes more CPU, thus power. If you can browse without having any flash ads or in fact any ads loaded and without any of the tracking scripts – you can browse much faster, scroll through pages much smoother and have [...]

Now you no longer pay me for Dropthings license instead you donate the money to a charity and I will give you the license. In case you don’t know what Dropthings is, it is a Web 2.0 Personalizable Dashboard framework that you can use to build Web 2.0 personalizable websites and enterprise dashboards. It is [...]

Microsoft Research arranged MVP Open Day 2011 at Cambridge on Oct 24, 2011. Beautiful university, made me feel like giving up my job and going back to study. Amazing research work going there, very thought provoking. The session on DNA programming was out of the world. The most surprising thing I learnt that a 10cm [...]

ASP.NET generates some large cookies if you are using ASP.NET membership provider. Especially if you are using the Anonymous provider, then a typical site will send the following cookies to every request when a user is logged in, whether the request is to a dynamic page or to any static resource: .DBANON=w3kYczsH8Wvzs6MgryS4JYEF0N-8ZR6aLRSTU9KwVaGaydD6WwUHD7X9tN8vBgjgzKf3r3SJHusTYFjU85y [...]

At 9 AM in the morning, during the peak traffic for your business, you get an emergency call that the website you built is no more. It’s not responding to any request. Some people can see some page after waiting for long time but most can’t. So, you think it must be some slow query [...]

A truly RESTful API means you have unique URLs to uniquely represent entities and collections, and there is no verb/action on the URL. You cannot have URL like /Customers/Create or /Customers/John/Update, /Customers/John/Delete where the action is part of the URL that represents the entity. An URL can only represent the state of an entity, like [...]

When you update javascript or css files that are already cached in users’ browsers, most likely many users won’t get that for some time because of the caching at the browser or intermediate proxy(s). You need some way to force browser and proxy(s) to download latest files. There’s no way to do that effectively across [...]

WCF service and client do not support HTTP Compression out of the box in .NET 3.5 even if you turn on Dynamic Compression in IIS 6 or 7. It has been fixed in .NET 4 but those who are stuck with .NET 3.5 for foreseeable future, you are out of luck.  First of all, it’s [...]

WCF service and client do not support HTTP Compression out of the box in .NET 3.5 even if you turn on Dynamic Compression in IIS 6 or 7. It has been fixed in .NET 4 but those who are stuck with .NET 3.5 for foreseeable future, you are out of luck.  First of all, it’s [...]