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Closed 10 years ago.
This is really a 2 part question. First of all, I just wanted to know how common is asp.net in the real world?
Secondly, I just want to know what are the read world scenario regarding scaling a asp.net site? http://highscalability.com/ almost never talked about the asp.net stack. Does anyone have any reason article that talks about how to scale an asp.net app?
Thanks.
I don't have numbers but based on the number of .net questions on so I'd say it's pretty common For your second question seehttp://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture
MySpace uses ASP.NET (source). A lot of big sites do. I would ignore the Plenty of Fish example though. From my recollection of stories I've read about it, they're just using HttpHandlers for output, skipping the Webforms stuff altogether. You could probably get Webforms to scale though if you absolutely had to. Most popular frameworks can handle high load, it just depends on the code and who's writing it. Anyone can program a site in any framework that won't scale but not vice versa.
As for how to scale, the biggest thing is caching, caching, caching. All big sites cache extensively. Facebook has thousands of servers just for caching. That's just a start though.
Yes asp.net is used in the real world. I have been following how Stackoverflow has been created since I first heard about it over a year ago and have taken away a lot of lessons. Following how stackoverflow will scale in future as their demand grows is pretty interesting and they are making a lot of their information public. Plus the podcasts are hilarious :)
Its hard to say how widespread ASP.NET is in the world but I think it is very widespread compared to PHP, Java and other server technologies. And I'm convinced that ASP.NET is as scalable as anything else you'll try.
If you wan't a starting point to read about ASP.NET performance you could take a look at chapter 6 of the P&P book "Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability". It's from 2004 so it might be a little outdated.
To give a couple of examples of high traffic sites running ASP.NET you just have to look at http://www.microsoft.com/ or https://stackoverflow.com/. if your site is smaller than these (and it probably is) scalability wont be you biggest concern. You should probably be more concerned about writing maintainable code.
Plenty of Fish with about 1,2 billion pageviews/month
Over 9000.
Realistically I've run into many high traffic websites StackOverflow as an example that use ASP.NET
One thing that is useful for high scalability is the ability to add more servers if needed and still be able to maintain your current session using various ASP.NET session state technologies.
Related
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Closed 10 years ago.
I am looking for either a best practice, supported, guide from Microsoft or a bloggers/developers guide of the same. Or both.
I am setting up some servers for hosting and I want to configure them with just enough permissions. I have done this before where I modified the Medium trust and gave it database permissions etc but I only briefed over it.
I want to setup solid machines with the respective, common, permissions that people use. Is there maybe a resource that explains in detail what each trust level has by default? That way I could compare and go from there.
To start the security, I have made a rule on my machines that I only create dedicated application pools per site/user. I know Microsoft say that each website is virtually seperate, even in the shared application pool space, but I just don't trust it.
I also know I shouldn't run in Full Trust as I am opening up my server to all kinds of attacks.
I have a bit of knowledge on this but not enough so hopefully you lot can help me. I'm not wanting to be spoon fed what to do, I have no problem figuring it out, I just can't find the info to start with.
I appreciate your help.
Anthony
I'm running:
Windows 2008 RC2 64 bit with IIS7.5 and a combination of 2.0/3.5 and 4.0 application pools.
The strict best practice is "don't let anything do anything to anything" but that is counterproductive in general -- if you aren't taking HTTP requests, you don't have a working HTTP application server.
That said, your question is very general and very nebulous. The first key question is "what sort of hosting scenario is this?" For example, full trust isn't necessarily a bad thing in a dedicated scenario, or even a shared server between "friendly" apps that should trust each other. But it is bad in a hotel server situation where you've got random guests sharing space.
The second question is what sorts of apps are you hosting? You've got completely different frontages depending on what you are doing -- spammers don't try as hard as thieves. Spies try even harder.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I was looking for some current opinions on WPF based on their 4.0 release.
We are trying to decide if we want a Desktop application with a WCF server, or if we want an ASP.Net web app. I would really like to do it in WPF, however some major concerns have come up that I am not sure if WPF can handle. I have looked around online and a lot of WPF reviews are based on the 3.5 version, so I was looking for some current opinions.
What sort of Support is out there for it? Microsoft support and Community? Is WPF a dying technology or a growing one?
It is harder to find WPF programmers. Is this always going to be the case?
What is the performance like for terminal services? The majority of our users login using WYSE thin-clients to a Windows 2003 terminal server. Each server normally has between 10 and 30 people on it on any given day. Most of our TS users only need basic view/insert/update abilities and our admin staff needs the more advanced features and reporting. The admin users all have XP machines with SP2 or higher.
What other concerns should I have about WPF?
It seems the underlying concern here is whether or not WPF is a mature enough technology for serious desktop application development. The answer there is IMHO certainly yes and the proof I offer is Visual Studio 2010. It is written in WPF, is a major desktop application and has to meet the criteria laid out in your question.
To attempt to head off the 2010 is slow + buggy argument. Yes, 2010 is not a perfect product and has bugs. The vast majority of those problems are not purely a WPF issue but instead are related to legacy code, managed native interop or just interesting interactions between old and new technology.
To answer some of the non-technical questions with hand wavy answers ...
Yes today it's probably harder to find WPF programmers than say WinForm programmers. WPF is a newer technology and hence likely won't have as many developers. Will this be true in the future will only be decided in the future :)
I feel like there is great support for WPF (see the WPF tag on this site for an example). When I started doing WPF work for the 2010 release the vast majority of the questions I had were already answered on this site or in blog tutorials.
#1 - I've done projects with WPF. There is quite a bit of information out there. Microsoft seems to be investing more in Silverlight at the moment, but I suspect that WPF and Silverlight will be merged in the coming years. WPF/Silverlight/XAML will be Microsoft's way of building desktop apps for the foreseeable future.
#2 - Developers with good WPF (or Silverlight) skills are hard to find, though not impossible. WPF/Silverlight definitely has a steep learning curve.
#3 - There have been problems with WPF apps running on terminal server because WPF runs on top of DirectX. I would definitely try running a WPF app on your Windows Server 2003 terminal server to see how it behaves. My biggest concern would be that Microsoft would likely be investing in any WPF-related fixes for Server 2008 TS and I'm not sure they would necessarily port those to Server 2003. As for a good test app, I would grab something like the WPF photo viewer demo (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms771331%28VS.90%29.aspx). Something reasonably graphically intensive to stress TS.
#4 - Personally #3 is the biggest concern IMHO. If you can't run on Windows Server 2003 TS, the other questions are moot.
Concern #1: What sort of Support
So far, it's growing and growing well. The IDE support is finally decent as of VS2010, and it appears as though MS is going to be pushing this for a good amount of time. There are lost of examples from MS and the community.
Concern #2: It is harder to find WPF programmers.
Well, it depends on how crazy you want to get with your UI. If you want the latest, greatest whiz bang 3D animations and multiple effects, it might be difficult to find someone off the street with all of those skills that you can afford. However, if you're banging out a relatively simple UI, many experienced developers can quickly grow into this role.
Concern #3: What is the performance like for terminal services?
That depends on how much animation and other whiz bang features you want to add. If there is lots happening on the screen, it will take more bandwidth. Once again, a simple interface should have no problems.
Concern #4: What other concerns should I have about WPF?
Hard to say!
There is always a risk that a technology will become obsolete. That's just the way it is. And there's no way to know for sure.
Here is a possible scenario: WPF is being overshadowed by Silverlight, since everyone wants to "do it on the web." You decide to develop your application in Silverlight (even though it's only a subset of WPF's feature set) and get blindsided by HTML 5, which takes over the world because now you can do everything in the browser without a plugin. Even Flash becomes obsolete.
Will it happen? Who knows?
People are still quite happily making Winforms applications, arguably an obsolete technology. Are they worried about obsolescence? Probably not.
As far as I know, Microsoft actively and enthusiastically supports this technology. If you are concerned about performance and other issues, the best way to find out if it meets your needs is to build a prototype.
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Closed 9 years ago.
How does Drupal's security compare to Plone's?
Note:
It will be great if the comparison includes V.7 for Drupal and V.4 for Plone.
Thanks
There's a good overview of how Plone handles the top 10 security issues in the web app world here:
http://plone.org/products/plone/security/overview
Organizations like the FBI, CIA and European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) all use Plone, if that is an indication.
Plone has the best track record in security of any major CMS, and we take it very seriously. We have an architecture that is built around sandboxing, proper ACLs and a powerful security model.
Drupal has a pretty horrible security record (see the CVE numbers quoted in another comment), as do the other two major PHP-based frameworks (Wordpress and Joomla). Plone is Python-based, but you probably know that already.
Plone makes it easier to write secure add-ons, since we have a proper security model that makes it pretty hard to write code that is inherently insecure. This is different from any other system out there, and is another core differentiator.
(And yes, this answer is biased, I'm one of the founders ;)
The security of the main framework is pretty solid in both cases; the problems are almost always found in the add-on modules, so you need to evaluate each module you plan to use individually.
When searching the "CVE" official common vulnerabilities database, you get the following figures:
Last 3 years: plone 8, drupal 282.
Last 3 months: plone 0, drupal 9
The basic architecture of plone is apparently much more secure. I don't know drupal, actually, but I do know plone. There are no sql injection bugs as there's an non-sql object database behind it. It is a long-running python program, basically, instead of PHP scripts, which makes it easier to have a good solid security mechanism that's harder to break or mis-handle.
(Note: I just did a simple keyword search at http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/search . Not all the results I see for drupal can be attributed to drupal, there seem to be some os-level vulnerabilities that somehow show up in the search results).
It's difficult to compare Plone and Drupal on equal metrics. CVEs is not the end-all comparison, and it's arguable how valuable it even is, as an indication of the relative security of the software. Of those 282 Drupal CVEs, how many were for Drupal core? Not 282.
limi can argue that the architecture is more secure, and point to Plone's response to the OWASP Top Ten. Drupal can do the same. And the "who uses it" argument? Well, whitehouse.gov uses Drupal, as well as a large number of other governmental and "enterprise" organizations.
There are several orders of magnitude more developers using Drupal; the higher numbers of vulnerabilities found can just as easily be attributed to more people bothering to look for them. These stats could easily be security by obscurity.
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Closed 10 years ago.
Basically I need to choose one so that, I can get familiar with it quickly and then customize it to my needs.
I'm a .NET developer and know classic ASP too. But I think understanding PHP will not be a problem for me and also think that it won't be that difficult.
What will you like to recommend me?
UPDATE:-
Sorry that I'm adding this info late.
Right now I don't know what customization I will be doing. But I'm sure going forward I will have my own requirement and will need to customize. So I don't want to be in situation where I will have to say "This engine which I'm using will not allow me XYZ change or it will be too difficult for me to make XYZ change in this blogging software, so lets migrate to something else."
I will prefer a short learning curve.
Wordpress is nice, but if you're a .NET developer BlogEngine.NET is extremely easy to extend. The drawback is the much smaller community and resources, but if you're wanting to do some real customization and tweaking, BlogEngine will probably fit your tastes much better. There is a decent development community backing and supporting customization and plugins for BlogEngine, but you'll find that a lot of the information is outdated or maintenance has been forgotten.
If you're wanting something with tons of community widgets, plug-ins and tons of themes, Wordpress is your prime choice without a question. But that's if you're going with the canned solutions. There are a lot of them, and you can still customize them and tweak things, but that's dependent on how comfortable you feel about picking up a new paradigm. Wordpress customization isn't so much PHP development, as it is Wordpress development, since you'll be so deep in Wordpress' own world and API.
Both are available in MS's Web Platform Installer, check them out of your box and play around with them some. It's really going to come down to which one you feel just fits. I've used both for different projects, but I've fallen back on doing my own thing with BlogEngine more than Wordpress. But that's for my own personal stuff.
If you know .NET and C#, facing PHP and mySql is going to feel like you went back to 19th century and have to burn coal in your "car" instead of tanking your beamer at a local gas station :-)
One particularly interesting thing about BlogEngine.NET is that out of the box it will run without SQL Server - just with XML files as a storage. If you know your programming I don't have to tell you what kind of flexibility that provides. Not that I'd recommend actually running a web site for a long time without SQL Server but such dual backing opens some very interesting options.
Should I mention that it comes with Visual Studio sln and proj files? :-) That pretty much means zero learning curve.
Go with Wordpress. It's easily customisable, and there's masses and masses of information on customising it.
Digging into Wordpress
Wordpress docs
Thematic - a Wordpress theme designed to be easily customisable/extensible.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I am currently looking at a distributed cache solution.
If money was not an issue, which would you recommend?
www.scaleoutsoftware.com
ncache
memcacheddotnet
MS Velocity
Out of your selection I've only ever attempted to use memcached, and even then it wasn't the C#/.NET libraries.
However memcached technology is fairly well proven, just look at the sites that use it:
...The system is used by several very large, well-known sites including YouTube, LiveJournal, Slashdot, Wikipedia, SourceForge, ShowClix, GameFAQs, Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Fotolog, BoardGameGeek, NYTimes.com, deviantART, Jamendo, Kayak, VxV, ThePirateBay and Netlog.
I don't really see a reason to look at the other solution's.
Good Luck,
Brian G.
One thing that people typically forget when evaluating solutions is dedicated support.
If you go with memcached then you'll get none, because you're using completely open source software that is not backed by any vendor. Yes, the core platform is well tested by virtue of age, but the C# client libraries are probably much less so. And yes, you'll probably get some help on forums and the like, but there is no guarantee responses will be fast, and no guarantee you'll get any responses at all.
I don't know what the support for NCache or the ScaleOut cache is like, but it's something that's worth finding out before choosing them. I've dealt with many companies for support over the last few years and the support is often outsourced to people who don't even work at the company (with no chance of getting to the people who do) and this means no chance of getting quality of timely support. On the other hand I've also dealt with companies who'll escalate serious issues to the right people, fix important issues very fast, and ship you a personal patch.
One of those companies is Microsoft, which is one of the reasons that we use their software as our platform. If you have a production issue, then you can rely on their support. So my inclination would be to go with Velocity largely on this basis.
Possible the most important thing though, whichever cache you choose, is to abstract it behind your own interface (e.g. ICache) which will allow you to evaluate a number of them without holding up the rest of the development process. This means that even if your initial decision turns out not to work for you, you can switch it without breaking much of the application.
(Note: I'm assuming here that all caches have sufficient features to support what you need from them, and that all caches have sufficient and broadly similar performance. This may not be a valid assumption, in which case you'll need to provide more detail in your question as to why it isn't).
You could also add Oracle Coherence to your list. It has both .NET and Java APIs.
From microsoft : App fabric
Commerical : NCache
Open source : RIAK
We tried a couple in the end we use the SQL session provider for asp.net/mvc yes there is the overhead of the connection to the DB but our DB server is very fast and the web farm has loads of capacity so not an issue.
Very interested in RIAK has .net client and used by Yahoo - can be scaled to many manu server