In this article, I will show you how to optimize your website performance. Yes, there are many ways to optimize your website performance. Ok, here we go, hope you enjoy this article.

Typical website may have the following architecture. We can do optimization in each layer but this post specifically talks about ASP.NET 4.5/IIS which is a presentation layer.

Page Request Tree  when a page load in browser you will get page request tree as shown below. You can get this tree if you use Page Speed(web developer tool). This can be downloaded from here. You can also use the toll YSLOW to analyze your webpage, can be downloaded from here.



If you look at the Request tree of a test web page above, the top box which is actually the html. The more requests you get to your site then longer the tree and in-turn slows the site.

Typical web site contains CSS files, Images and Javascript files along with you HTML elements. CSS files, Images and JS files will take some time to load into the browser though the loading time is in milliseconds but matters.



The HTML is not taking much time but other elements are taking time to load in to the browser.

The Typical ASP.NET web site might look like as below in Visual Studio. It may contain Scripts  folder, Images Folder, Styles Folder and a Default aspx page.



Usually you refer them in your page as shown below



If you run the Page Speed tool on above page then you might get the below score



it also gives you the suggestion where else you can improve the site performance. If you look at the same page in Yslow then you might get the below statistics



There are 46 HTTP Requests, 5 Java Script files, 6 Style Sheet files and 8 images. Total weight of the page is 11.5K. Some of the browsers actually cache these images, we do not have a control on their logic.

The first problem that we can see from the above report is too many HTTP requests which are going to images, CSS files and to JavaScript files.

We can use Bundling and Minifying the files to reduce those requests. In ASP.NET 4.5 you have the built-in features to these. Write one line of code in Global.asax to bring these HTTP Requests down. You can read more about bundling in ASP.NET 4.5 here



The above line enables the minification for CSS and Javascript files, only these two. Minifying means removing whitespaces, comments and everything that browser does not need to understand. We can really compress these files using this technique.

Basically this bundling technique looks at the folder and takes all the files inside and bundles them into one file, no matter how many are in the folder. This all happens at runtime. It only happens at once.

The order of bundling of your files goes as first it takes all Jquery scripts first and then it takes custom scripts alphabetically from your solution explorer.

Instead of doing the references to individual files, You can do this



Styles/CSS is the convention. Folder name / CSS bundles all the css files on that folder. We can do the same foe JavaScript as shown below



Results of writing above lines of code are shown below which makes HTTP requests down to 37



Suppose if you want to bundle the files by taking from different directories in bundle into single file by using the below code

In above code we are registering our own bundle named mycss and then we are adding file styles.css and a directory styles.

Compress components with gZip. we can enables this on IIS. You tell the server everything that respond to client that text based zip it. You can do this by changing the couple of attribute values in web.config file



In IIS 7.5 it enables for you by default, if you running on windows server 2008 then you need to set the attribute values to true.

Encoding the Images to Base64 Images



Above code shows before and after encoding the image.

You may not want to encode all images in your project but if you want the images that you want to embed along with style sheets then you can write some regular expressions as shown below.



After doing the above steps then we are ending with 19 page requests



We can even transform your response further using coffee script as shown below





You can optimize the images in your folder by using Visual Studio extension tool named Optimize Images.



You can see the before and after percentage of optimization of images in output window



You can read more about this concept here

Another major release in .NET Framework, .NET 4.5 which allows the developers to use Windows 8 technologies and windows runtime directly from .NET 4.5. It makes easy and natural to write Metro style applications using C# and VB. .NET 4.5 makes your applications run faster eg: Faster ASP.NET startup. .NET 4.5 gives  you easy access to your data with entity framework code first approach and recent SQL Server features. This post discuss these features in detail.

You can download the .NET FW  4.5 Developer preview from here.

Yes, Visual Studio 2011 will coming soon. This is really a great addition in Visual Studio 2011 Developer Preview for ASP.NET developers. If you are familiar with  WPF and XMAL development in Visual Studio, it should be well known for you, because  preview version of Visual Studio supports  generation of  event handler code from XMAL markup itself.  With Visual Studio 2011 developer preview, creating event handlers for ASP.NET controls have become significantly easy. You really don’t not need to write the event handler manually or  generating the even handler from design view.

In VS 2011 Developer preview, markup intellisense for all ASP.NET server-side events will show you list of exiting handlers and a value called “<Create New Event>” . Which means you can attach the event with some exiting event handler or  select “create New event” to generate an new  handler with the right signature in the code-behind file.



If there is no control Id provided, Visual Studio will consider the control id as “Unnamed” and will generate the event handler as shown in below.





If you are wondering  about what will happen if there are multiple controls  without ids, does Visual studio going to attach with same event handler? No, It will  append an incremental number with event handler name.



Visual Studio will generate Event handler name as <ControlName>_Click if control id is provided.