Task Runners
Task Runners can be used to….run tasks! This is usually done as part of the build process for tasks such as minifying JavaScript and CSS. There are a few task runners out there such as Grunt, Gulp and Broccoli(?!) but Microsoft were recommending Gulp. These are integrated a bit better in more recent versions of Visual Studio and ASP.NET, but can be used in any web development project.A few of the task plugins:
gulp-minify-css: minifies your CSS files removing comments, whitespace and new lines to reduce file size and make the site load quickergulp-uglify: minifies JavaScript and can also do stuff like shortening names of functions and variables in the minified version of your JavaScript to reduce file size
gulp-autoprefixer: some browsers implement their own CSS features which are prefixed with –webkit, -moz or –ms. This makes sure you have prefixes for all browsers if you use one of them
gulp-concat: bundles files into a single file (e.g. multiple CSS files into one, or multiple JavaScript files into one) to reduce number of requests made by the browser and improve performance
gulp-imagemin: Optimizes .png and .jpg images for the web
Tasks can be chained together in Gulp so that you could minify several CSS files and then concatenate into one. You can also set Gulp to watch for changes to files and run automatically when you make changes.
Performance & Best Practises
There are a few check-lists, site scanners and plugins that will check sites for performance and best practises. Site authentication often prevents site scanning websites from accessing sites but you can still check your work with a plugin such as YSlow. This will give a report with a rating for a page and a list of recommendations. Many of the recommendations are covered by the task runners mentioned above (minifying and concatenating). Another checklist worth reading through is http://webdevchecklist.com/.Image sprites are a single image file containing multiple icons and CSS to pick out individual icons from the file. This reduces the number of HTTP requests made by the page and improves performance compared to requesting each image individually. Going even further, it is recommended that icon fonts are used, where appropriate, so that the icons can easily be scaled and their colour can be changed.
There are web.config changes that can be implemented for caching settings and compression of files but then ‘cache busting’ strategies should be investigated so that clients get the latest versions of files when caching is being used.
Entity Framework
Entity Framework is a Microsoft technology for working with databases and simplifies going between C# classes and database tables. It is recommended that you take a code first approach – write your classes, set up your database connection string and the tables can be automagically created in the database. You can create classes from an existing database but you can get into problems if you want to make database changes and then import again.ASP.NET Web API
Used to create RESTful web services and integrates well with Entity Framework. A Visual Studio feature (‘scaffolding’) can automatically create web service methods for CRUD operations from your Entity Framework models. You can also easily add OData support to add filtering and sorting to you web services via a query string (e.g. “‘?$name eq ‘bob’”).ASP.NET Smart Tags / Tag Helpers
These are ASP.NET tags used in your HTML which are rendered on the server. One example give was loading scripts based on the environment. This lets you deliver full JavaScript and CSS files in the development environment but minified versions in production.Another example was fall-back href’s when loading scripts. You can refer to CDN versions of popular scripts such as jQuery to improve performance, but provide a fall-back URL to a version on your server if the CDN is not available or the file is no longer on the CDN.
Web Performance and Load Test
A new project template in Visual Studio 2015 allows you to simulate web site load and analyse results. The requests are generated from Azure so presumably there is a cost associated with it and I'm not sure how it would work with site authentication.ASP.NET Core
Microsoft have released an open source version of ASP.NET which runs on Windows, Linux and OSX. This can handle as much as 8 times the traffic of an ASP.NET 4.6 site on the same server. This is largely achieved by allowing you to configure which pipeline features are used when handling requests.You can also ship your site bundled with the framework which avoids version dependency problems on the server.
Despite all of this goodness, it isn't finished yet and doesn't have a lot of the features of ASP.NET 4.6.
