As an avid user of Firefox the dangers of using one browser (apart from initial testing) became apparent today, especially considering most web users still use Internet Explorer.

I recently converted my site to use Blogger, and I also thought I'd share interesting news articles I read with my visitors by using Google Reader's Javascript widget.

Google Reader is still in Beta

I placed the Javascript widget on my home page and my blog pages a while back. I just checked my site in Internet Explorer 7 and was amazed to see only the template was rendered. There was a distinct lack of content!

I looked at the source HTML, and the content was there. I was puzzled for a few minutes until I realised what the blog page and the home page had in common; The Javascript Google widget.

I quickly removed them and FTPed the pages, the problem was resolved. I grabbed the URL the script block was trying to call and tried to download the external Javascript straight to my browser... it timed-out.

It appears that Internet Explorer will get stuck when external Javascript doesn't load, so be aware of this the next time you choose to use an externally hosted Javascript file. Opera and Firefox didn't seem to have a problem.

Creating a successful website can be a hit and miss affair even before you've even thought about attracting users to the site.

There are countless websites, books and consultants dedicated to designing websites, web programming and development, search engine optimisation, usability and accessibility. However even if you have an expert specialising in each field on your development team you will have to make difficult decisions along the way which can have a fundamental impact on how your site will perform. This won't be much of a surprise to anyone in the business.

Web Designers Role

Web designers for instance need to be able to create designs that have a high level of usability as well as creating a visually appealing design that sticks to standard methods of navigation with a colour scheme that conforms to accessibility guidelines. Good guidelines and specifications are needed from the client and the other members of the team prior to commencing work so the designer knows the scope of the project.

Web Developers Role

Web developers need to be aware of search engine optimisation techniques and accessibility practices while building pages based on the chosen design. The choice of development environment is also important. Will your website scale when your users increase? Will your choice of platform and IDE have negative impacts on your SEO and usability efforts? Dreamweaver and other WYSIWIG editors are renound for adding reams of unnecessary HTML to your pages. Visual Studio's standard web controls also introduce problems with large VIEWSTATE tags and lots of pointless nested tables.

Search Engine Marketers Role

Search engine marketers need to make sure that they stick to "White Hat" methodoligies. They will need to have an intimate understanding of your business or product(s) in order perform keyword research.
In the push to get goods search rankings usability can be affected by excessive keyword stuffing, which can make paragraphs of text un-readble.

Usability and Website Testing

While usability evangelists will restrain the designers and developers from using browser plug-in technologies and any form of cutting edge design, or navigational elements that deviate from what Web users' expect. Badly positioned advertisements can also affect the usability of the site especially the flash pop-out kind.

The Client

If the client insists on items of functionality and design that will have a detrimental effect on the site such as using a splash page, a non-standard navigation tool etc, he or she will need to be educated on the impact of implementing such items.

Lots of websites fail to look at website development from one or more of these view points and suffer one way or another. Whether that is through confusing users with un-navigable sites, failing to generate traffic because of poor search engine optimisation or making people install software to view your content.

Creating a successful website requires a lot of different skill sets, but this will depend partly on your audience and your individual goals for the project.

I've been looking at the ASP.NET cache object, which makes the older Application object effectively redundant. The analogy is that it is like a leaky bucket. A bucket in which you can store data which is "expensive" to retrieve from its source every time. Since databases and files are considered slow in comparison with in-memory data then it makes sense to keep a copy of certain data you use frequently in the cache, which is stored in memory.
The bucket is leaky because you can only put so much data in the cache before it fills up and has to drop some. It uses a simple method called LRU - Least Recently Used to decide what data it disposes of by default. I say by default, because you can specify, if you so wish and make data persist for a period of time or make it dependent on other data on file, database, or cached data.

The cache is shared however by the whole application and is therefore accessible by the whole application, so you have to be careful what kind on data you store in here. You probably don't want to store user specific data here!
You also need to check that the data you want to use is in the cache before you go and use it. Sounds obvious, but if you don't code this right, by assigning the cached object to a variable then checking the variable you could discover bugs which you can't replicate in a test environment.

Deciding when to move business logic to the data layer in a multi-tiered application is a tricky one and depends a lot on the RDMS you are using.
I've been looking at an ASP.NET application that creates 7 rows in a database for each "musical performance" when a button is clicked on a web form to rebuild a database.
To begin with a SQL 2005 stored procedure written in VB.NET (But could easily have been C# with the same results since all .NET languages are compiled to IL). was called from a loop in the business layer 7 times to create the 7 rows. The application was run and it took about 90 seconds to rebuild a test database in this manner.

This logic was then moved into 1 stored procedure still written in VB.NET; The result was that instead of making 7 calls to the database each time, we make 1 call to the database and move the business logic, executing the loop there, and hence at the data layer. The database rebuild took about 30 seconds this time.

Stored Procedures in Native T-SQL

To try and make the execution faster we decided to write the stored procedure in T-SQL, which is still the native language of SQL Server. This shaved another 15 seconds of the execution time! Just proving what sort of overhead writing your stored procedures in anything other than T-SQL introduces.

This exercise provides a glimpse into how the decisions you make when designing an application radically affect the responsiveness of the system.

Business Logic at the Data Layer

If you were pulling lots of data to the business layer performing some processing then discarding most of the data at that point, then it may improve performance if this operation was moved down to the data layer. It really depends on the data and the application.
One of the problems with storing too much application logic in the data layer is version control. It can become a mine field managing lots of complex stored procedures between test and live environments and keeping them in-sync with the application.

On the last Learning Tree ASP.NET course I took I never thought to inquire why we were made to work in pairs sitting in front of one PC workstation. Well it seems this is not a cost cutting exercise, which were my first thoughts. Apparently Learning Tree bases this on research and programming methodologies (namely Extreme Programming, which I may have to look into further at some point). According to the lecturer the perfect number of programmers crafting a piece of code is 1.8 (Some pieces of code are too trivial for two developers to work on simultaneously), but in a learning environment it is 2.2, with the extra help coming from the teacher and other peers in the class room.

Essentially what he was trying to say was; developers can't think and type at the same time, the product of pair programming is less errors and better quality, structured code.