MSDN Magazine - August 2008 - (Page 15)

is the Performance view, which lists 13 performance tips, such as “Make fewer HTTP requests” and “gzip components.” The loaded Web page is evaluated against these 13 metrics and assigned a letter grade for improve the page’s performance, YSlow lists them here. You can click any of these tips to be whisked to a page with a more detailed explanation of the impact on performance and information on how to implement the performance enhancement. In addition to its Stats and Performance views, YSlow includes a number of helpful tools. From the YSlow menu you can run the page’s JavaScript through Douglas Crockford’s JSLint program, which parses the script for common problems. There are also tools to view the page’s entire JavaScript or CSS content on a single page, regardless JavaScript and CSS are split. And there’s a tool for displaying YSlow’s Performance, Stats, and external resources views in a single, formatted Web page, which makes it easy to print or e-mail the results. Price: Free. YSlow: developer.yahoo.com/yslow Firebug: getfirebug.com their understanding of Visual Basic or who are in need of a good desk reference. Visual Basic language concepts, including As a freelance developer and consultant, I work with clients who have existing apps but need help in adding new features. Some applications are written in C#, others in Visual Basic , so I need to have a mastery of both languages. Visual Basic is easy to pick ® semantics have helped make it one of the most popular programming languages in the world. But there’s a wide gulf between knowing Visual Basic and mastering it. To help bolster my Visual Basic skills, I picked up Accelerated VB 2008 (Apress, 2008) by Guy Fouché and Trey Nash. This book dispenses with the typical pagetrade books and replaces it with distilled information and code examples that get right to the point. Because of this terse style, however, Accelerated VB 2008 is not for beginners who are interested in learning Visual Basic, but it’s ideal for intermediate developers who are either looking to bolster msdnmagazine.com Subsequent chapters look at working with higher-level constructs, such as strings, arrays, collections, and generics. There’s also chapters on threading and LINQ. I especially liked the Visual Basic 2008 Best Practices chapter, which offers guidance for developers creating new classes. The chapter includes discussions on designing classes that can be cloned, converted to other types, and ordered. If you’ are an intermediate developer looking to hone your Visual Basic skills, or are in need of a Visual Basic language desk reference, pick up Accelerated VB 2008. Price: $39.99. apress.com SCOTT MITCHELL, author of numerous books and founder of 4GuysFromRolla.com, is an MVP who has been working with Microsoft Web technologies since 1998. Scott is an independent consultant, trainer, and writer. Reach him at Mitchell@4guysfromrolla.com or via his blog at ScottOnWriting.NET. August 2008 15 http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow http://getfirebug.com http://apress.com http://www.cete.com http://ScottOnWriting.NET http://www.cete.com http://msdnmagazine.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of MSDN Magazine - August 2008

MSDN Magazine - August 2008 Toolbox CLR Inside Out Basic Instincts Cutting Edge Patterns in Practice Data 2.0 - Expose And Consume Data In A Web Services World Biztalk EDI - Build A Robust EDI Solution With BizTalk Server Silverlight - Create Animations With XAML And Expression Blend Write On! - Create Web Apps You Can Draw On With Silverlight 2 Wicked Code - Craft Custom Controls For Silverlight 2 Team System Foundations Windows With C++ Concurrent Affairs Going Places { End Bracket }

MSDN Magazine - August 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.