Minimising the number of requests the page has to perform can have a considerable effect on your site’s performance. IE6 and IE7 both limit the number of concurrent requests to 2, IE8 can handle up to 6. There is a lot you can to improve the initial load speed speed – one of which is bundling all your CSS and JS into two separate files. How much of a difference it could do. Well, as it turns out up to 30seconds on slower connections.

If for whatever reason you use IHttpHandlers in your MVC project, it may be that you are still using web.config to set the path to the handlers. This can get tricky and easy to miss, especially if you move from cassini dev to IIS7 live.

There is however a better, neater way to declare paths to your handers. If you are using MVC, you can register the handlers in RouteTable, along with your other routes. All you need to do is implement IRouteHandler interface and register a route using your custom route handler.

Model binding in MVC attempts to map values from IValueProviders to your specified model. The value providers (FormValueProvider, QueryStringValueProvider, HttpFileCollectionValueProvider, RouteDataValueProvider, JsonValueProviderFactory … ) abstract the actual value retrieval and binders then handle the value mapping onto the model.

You can create custom model binders to abstract and centralise complex mapping logic that would otherwise end up in your controllers or services. When dealing with a larger number of binders, it is good to refactor common logic and enable wiring up of the new binders easily. Instead of having to register each binder one-by-one in global or prefix the type in the actions, we can create our own model binder broker to replace the default MVC DefaultModelBinder.

Statistically Awesome Style Sheets with Compass can help you easily generate sprites. Not only that, it will re-generate the images, re-calculate the position and update the CSS every time you update the source images. This post explains the basics and aims to address the most common scenarios when creating sprites.

Traditionally, settings in ASP.Net apps are stored AppSettings area of the app as a key-value store. More complex apps would create specific config sections. The app would then have a static settings wrapper that would read the content from the web.config.

I like strongly typed view models in MVC. Typical structure of my site in Razor View Engine includes a page base model that is used in the Layout template and then I use inheritance to add properties to each model or commonly re-used properties. There are various reasons why to avoid dynamic in your models, besides the fact that you cannot use dynamic in master frame using razor.

Since I already covered the intro, install, features and syntax of SASS. It’s time to show some real-world application of SASS. If used properly, SASS can really save you time.

SASS is a super-set of CSS, that means, any existing CSS that you already wrote will just work. What we usually do, is paste any legacy CSS (if any) to our SASS file and take it from there. I’ve posted few examples of the syntax below. In my next post, I will focus on the real-world usage of SASS.

Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets (SASS) aims to make writing CSS easy, re-usable and less repetitive. The new SCSS (Sassy CSS) syntax makes use of variables, mixins, nested rules and inheritance to achieve this goal. Furthermore, I will show you how to use compass to leverage in-built functionality. This series of posts will not argue between SASS and LESS, it will be a quick guide on how to get up and running with SASS within VS and how SASS can help you.

I while back I blogged about how to approach error logging in production multi-node environments so that you stay sane. Later on, I looked at a way to deal with application level metrics using statsd.

One last piece of the puzzle is monitoring of the health of the nodes themselves. This typically includes CPU and Memory usage, disk space monitoring and application health monitoring. Diamond collectors are great exactly for that.