Kent Alstad

One of the reasons that ASP.NET has become popular as a framework for Web developers is the availability of third-party controls and tools. This third-party product support means that, when you're developing features and functionality in an ASP.NET application, you have "buy versus build" options in many areas. Usually, if the options are buying a third-party control or rolling up your sleeves and manually coding the solution yourself, the choice is an easy one. With the latter, you're looking at investing an unknown amount of time and resources into re-creating something that already exists. With the former, you get a known result and a drop-and-go solution. What you may not realize, however, is that the possibilities for third-party "buy" options extend far beyond controls. Today, ASP.NET developers can take the same approach to many application performance optimiz... (more)

Developing Situational Applications with Web 2.0 Mashups

The evolution of Web sites to dynamic rich interactive applications is a true revolution for users. But for ASP.NET developers tasked with building high-performing scalable applications, it presents major challenges. The features that characterize blogs, wikis, personalized pages, and other data-driven Web 2.0 applications fundamentally change processing, transmission, and rendering workloads, and require new approaches and solutions. In Web 2.0 applications: •   Content is highly dynamic, with the most of the content generated by users. The popularity of individual pages or the... (more)