Tagged articles - ASP.NET

In memory caching is not a bullet proof way of caching data in an application, especially if this application is distributed. The lack of synchronization between nodes can cause you application to misbehave showing wrong data or even throwing exceptions and crashing. This is one of the main reasons why distributed caching is the best way of doing the caching in your web application. But not all applications you might be developing need to run as distributed on multiple machines... read more

In case you have any page on your website which allows anonymous users to POST data to your web application, you should always use any kind of bot protection. Usually that is any kind of CAPTCHA implementation... read more

Even before popularity of micro service approach, for even monolithic applications you needed to have health-checks (Google Compute Engine) or health-probes (Microsoft Azure) for load balancing. Basically in load balancing scenario, these endpoints are used to tell load balancer whether instance can handle requests or not. Since handling of requests may consider several components, these endpoints either return 200 OK HTTP response or any other response like 500 Internal Server Error with optional payload message describing the issue and each component status. ... read more

Both Web API in .NET 4.5 and later and Web API in ASP.NET CORE have great error handling support out of the box. You can specify you global handler and control your response to a client when exception happens. ... read more

Often case when you need to convert String to a different type which is most of the time a primitive type in C# is when you are reading values from configuration. In both .NET and .NET Core, reading from configuration return plain String value... read more

Authentication in web services is a bit more different than with web pages because of one simple reason. There is no UI for entering credentials to authenticate to consume service... read more

Enums in C# can contain multiple values if they are decorated with [Flags] attribute. However, Flag Enums are not recommended to be used in web api action method signatures... read more

Cross-site Scripting (XSS) refers to client-site code injection attack where an attacker can execute malicious scripts into a web application. Basically attacker manages to upload malicious script code to the website which will be later on served to the users and executed in their browser... read more

WebP is an image format introduced by Google Developers and it provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. Using WebP, webmasters and web developers can create smaller, richer images that make the web faster. ... read more

Minification of Cascade Style Sheet (CSS) and Java Script (JS) should be on a TODO list for every web application. The minification of CSS and JS can be easily one on the runtime with ASP.NET bundling which is build in in ASP.NET framework, but in case of distributing your resource files over CDN you cannot use the runtime minification. You physical files need to be minified... read more

Starting from few years ago, Google enforces secured over unsecured website traffic. However it is an ongoing process since both publishers and advertisers need to implement HTTPS in order to avoid mixed contnet exception in a browser and preventing ads to load on a website. ... read more

Minification of resource can speed up your page load and decrease network traffic making you pages load faster, especially on a poor Internet connections. Keep in mind that not all of your website visitors have high speed Internet connection. Especially if you are targeting countries with mostly poor Internet connection, HTML minification can really boost the page load and improve user experience... read more

Configuration files are a useful place too keep any related configuration settings. It provides easy to use configuration fetching which you can invoke from any part of the application. However it does not support many stuff out of the box, but on the other hand it is pretty flexible and expendable. One of the things that are not there built in is support for lists. ... read more

Taking out business logic from the application allows different clients running on a different platform to use same logic. REST API is a great way to decuple business logic and make it available to different clients on a different platforms. To upload files using WebApi we first need to define an action in a WebApi controller to handle files posted to the endpoint. ... read more

When deploying application to specific location it is often required to deploy only few files and not the whole deployment package. For example, if you changed only single static image file in your ASP.NET WebApplication, there is no reason to overwrite bin folder content and cause WebApplication on IIS to restart. ... read more