In this article, Paul Ballard discusses 5 common mistakes made when designing and developing web services. Some of these mistakes include using .NET specific types as parameters and return values, not making use of caching, and using web services for data access.

http://weblogs.asp.net/jdanforth/archive/2003/12/16/43841.aspx

Isolated storage is a special area on the hard drive that your application knows how to find. The clever thing is that your application can’t see the physical path location (this is managed by the .NET framework). What’s more your application doesn’t need permission to write to the hard drive – so this technique is suitable for .NET applications that are running in a restricted security mode. Only the User and Assembly that creates the storage can have access to it. If your corporate environment has been designed to support hot-desking then Isolated Storage also supports roaming profiles

In essence Isolated Storage is a well thought out viable storage area that you can take advantage of when you’re considering your storage options. Isolated Storage Classes live in the System.IO Namespace and consist of a Store (the storage area) which has methods to create directories and read files and you can read and write to the area using Streams.

You could write a DataSet into Isolated Storage simply using the following code:

IsolatedStorageFile storeWrite = IsolatedStorageFile.GetUserStoreForDomain();
IsolatedStorageFileStream streamWrite = new IsolatedStorageFileStream("MyXML.xml", FileMode.Create, storeWrite);
myDataSet.WriteXml(streamWrite,XmlWriteMode.WriteSchema);
streamWrite.Close();
storeWrite.Dispose();
this.Close();

In order to read it back again, you could do the following:

IsolatedStorageFile storeRead = IsolatedStorageFile.GetUserStoreForDomain();
IsolatedStorageFileStream streamRead = new IsolatedStorageFileStream("MyXML.xml", FileMode.Open, storeRead);
myDataSet.ReadXml(streamRead,XmlReadMode.ReadSchema);
streamRead.Close();
storeRead.Dispose();

There is a command line utility storeadm.exe which you can use to manually view Isolated Storage and help debug applications that make use of isolated storage. And the Isolation provided can be either configured so that the storage area cannot be shared across components in different applications, or it can be configured so that it can be shared across components in different applications. The flexibility is down to you.

This was originally written by Graham Parker.

Steve Ballmer is Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft Corp. Ballmer joined Microsoft in 1980 and was the first business manager hired by Bill Gates. Since then, Ballmer's passion and leadership have become hallmarks of his tenure at the company.

Check out his passion and spirit.

This man is incredible.

My previous blog on default file upload size took me to search on the default packet size with SQL Server. Here is what I found:

The default network packet size for clients communicating with SQL Server is 4096 bytes. In most cases, this is overall best setting. But in some special cases, this SQL Server configuration setting should be changed. If the client regularly transfers large amounts of text or image data to SQL Server, or performs large BCP or DTS operations, then increasing the default size can boost performance because the number of network packets is reduced. On the other hand, if your application only sends and receives small amounts of data, then a smaller packet size can boost responsiveness.

Thanks to www.sql-server-performance.com

Developer needs to be aware of the config setting attribute maxRequestLength in httpRuntime of Machine.Config while are using file upload functionality in your applications. The default setting is 4096 KB which is 4 MB. Now, if you need to upload file size greater than this, you may need to look into changing this configuration:

At runtime, .Net framework checks the maximum size for the request object. This information is obtained from the application's condiguration file. If this limit is not specified in web.config file, then it is obtained from machine.config file. By default this limit os set to 4096KB.

<httpRuntime executionTimeout="90"
                  maxRequestLength="4096"
                  useFullyQualifiedRedirectUrl="false"
                  minFreeThreads="8"
                  minLocalRequestFreeThreads="4"
                  appRequestQueueLimit="100"/>

To modify this limit, you can change the number in machine.config. but preferably, create the entry in your application's web.config file.