I am developing a web-based Pokemon Online game. Since it is online, I would like to optimize it to run as quickly possible.
I've installed Firebug and Page Speed suggests minifying my HTML output. I'm also using VS2008, ASP.NET 3.5, AJAX, and IIS 7.5; along with URL-Rewriting.
I want to minify my HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Optimally, I'd like the minifying process to happen at compile time. I've spend hours looking online but couldn't find a decent solution, can you help me? Thank you.
Firstly, you should read the Yahoo best practices for speeding up webpages.
You will probably find that minifying the HTML won't have much difference (also see this question), but a lot of the other suggestions in that article will.
There are a couple of methods to achieve this. You can configure GZip compression with IIS7 if you have access. If you don't i.e. you are using a hosting provider it is possible to activate compression from within your code.
See this SO Post for further reading.
UPDATE:
To perform this at build time rather than run time see this blog post.
Instead of minifying your .aspx files consider dynamic compression. This will send compressed data to the browser. since you are using IIS 7.5 dynamic compression comes built-in you just have to enable it.
Related
I need to get information from couple of web sites . For example this site
What would be the best way to get all the links from the page so that the information could be extracted.
Some times need to click on a link to get other links inside that.
I tried Watin and I tried doing the same from within Excel 2007 with Web Data option.
Could you please suggest some better way which I am not aware of .
Ncrawler might be very useful for the deep level crawling . You could also set the MaxCrawlDepth for specifying the same.
Have a look at WGet. It is an incredibly powerful tool for mining the content of a single page or an entire website. The options available allow you to dictate how many levels deep to follow in terms of links, what to do with static resources such as images, how to handle relative links, etc. It also does a very good job of mining pages which are generated dynamically, such as those served by CGI or ASP.
It's been around for many years in the 'nix world but executables compiled for Windows are readily available.
You would need to kick it off from .NET using Process.Start but you could then pipe the results into multiple files (which mimic the original website structure), a single file, or into memory by capturing standard output. Then you can do subsequent analysis such as extracting HREF HTML elements (if it is only links you are interested in) or grabbing the sort of table data evident in the link you provide in your question.
I realise this is not a 'pure' .NET solution but the power WGET offers more than compensates for this, in my opinion. I have used it myself in the past, in this way, for exactly the sort of thing I think you are trying to do.
I recommend to use http://watin.org/. This is much simpler than wget :-)
I am building a custom Content Management System for my client, using C#2008, ASP.Net technology. I am looking for advice regarding the architecture (application layout, database layout etc) of such a system.
Anyone here have any experience design / developing such a system? Any websites that I can get more information from?
Any open source CMS out there?
Thanks in advance.
Any open source CMS out there?
Check out Umbraco, its very good, not suitable for everything (depends on your sites content really) but you get so much for free that it would be silly to not give it a look over, its not a small bedroom hack up job.
Regarding creating your own CMS, I'd probably try to steer you away from it, its not for the faint of heart unless your content demands are very niche. Even then its better to build on top of something else if at all possible.
ASP.net MVC would be worth a look too if you are going down that code your own route, would save you some headaches.
DotNetNuke is a good open source CMS is specifically for ASP.NET development. Definitely worth a look.
I've written a blog post about content modeling and data stores for content management systems. I think it could be useful: Blog post: Get more out of your content: content modeling and data stores
I want to make a program that will simulate a user browsing a site and clicking on links. Cookies and javascript have to be enabled. I've successfully done this in python, but I want to write it an compilable language (python ide's don't cut it). The links on the site are generated with javascript and are dynamic. With python I used PAMIE (third party module that uses win32com) to launch an instance of Internet explorer, scrape the generated html for the links, then navigate to one of them. The point is for the whole process to be transparent to the server. What's the best (compilable) language and method to do this? I was thinking C# with WebBrowser control but I don't want to spend a lot of time learning something if it isn't going to work. Any kind help is appreciated!
You might want to look at the automated testing via browser suites:
http://www.teknologika.com/blog/the-holy-grail-net-automated-web-gui-testing-for-internet-explorer/
http://watin.sourceforge.net/
I wrote a blog post on this awhile back: Web scraping in .NET. That discusses cookies but not JavaScript; I don't know if that would require additional coding.
Might be worth having a look at selenium .
We use it for web testing in a C# asp.net envirnorment.
The documentation isn't to bad
I know i can use AJAX and SILVERLIGHT with my ASP.NET web page. But what do you think about using flash with asp.net? Can this be done? How can this be done? Would you recommend me using flash at all with ASP.NET? I will NOT be using WEB SERVICES, just a plain ASP.NET website.
Thanks in advance!
EDIT: What about performance issues???
I have used Flash in ASP.NET websites plenty.
Software should always boil down to the best tool for the job, if Flash is the way you need to go for your RIA, then so be it.
Remember, ASP.NET is nothing "new/different" ultimately, it is just a fancy HTML generator.
Therefore, to use flash, you simply use the plain old HTML OBJECT and EMBED tags to place the Flash on the page.
The benefit of using things like ASP.NET (or any other framework) is that you can encapsulate the EMBED logic to use things like swfObject.
flash is client side, what you use server side has very little impact on it.
Given Flash's high market penetration (98%+), I think Flash is a great way to go regardless of the underlying platform.
But, as with everything, it depends on what you want to do. If you want to deliver a rich user interface via Flash, you should consider using Flex.
There are several tools to help integrate a Flash/Flex application with ASP.NET. One of these that I recommend is WebORB.
It certainly can be done! We've done entire flash-based websites in the past that rely on data generated by a CMS and read from flash via XML. There are of course lots of gotchas (loading html text, multilingual characters), but once you've done it a few times you'll get the hang of it.
Flex is probably a better option.
I have an ASP.net website ( http://www.erate.co.za ) version 2.0.
When someone opens my website in Firefox everything looks different.
Why is that and how can I make it compatible?
Please help!
Etienne
The problems don't have anything to do with ASP.NET / C# Specifically.
They have to do with your understanding of web design / HTML / CSS and how you can make a cross-browser compatible UI.
I'd suggest you look at http://www.w3schools.com/ for some information on good web design practices.
Some obvious problems with the Source that you need to address are
No common css Stylesheets
Styles are applied inline on lots of elements
using long strings of " " to align text
The underlying server technology should not have any impact on your websites appearence as long as you are just producing HTML.
What you need to do is make sure that your HTML and CSS works as intended in all browsers. A good way to start is to make sure that you only output standards compliant code.
The issue at hand is that styles that you are using don't work in firefox such as cursor:hand; versus cursor:pointer; both work in IE but only pointer works in firefox. A quick recommendation would be to just run the resultant page through the w3c validator located at: http://validator.w3.org/
Per se, ASP.NET produce vanilla HTML/Javascript, so there's nothing wrong with the technology.
Focus on the html, try to be as close as possible to the w3c standards, it should help a lot.
Firebug, an incredible web dev extension for Firefox should also help you a lot in debugging your CSS.
It might be a painful task, especially if your site is old and big. Good luck!