Dino Esposito

Dino Esposito has authored more than 20 books and 1,000 articles in his 25-year career. Author of “The Sabbatical Break,” a theatrical-style show, Esposito is busy writing software for a greener world as the digital strategist at BaxEnergy. Follow him on Twitter: @despos.
23 December 2015
23 December 2015

Script Loading between HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2

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Web pages increasingly suffer from JavaScript-library bloat. Because it is difficult to avoid the awkward wait while these libraries load, there are some techniques for making the loading of these script files less evident to the page-load time. The introduction of HTTP/2 opens up further opportunities to defer script load or do it asynchronously in parallel. Dino explains.… Read more
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15 October 2015
15 October 2015

So You Need to Expose JSON Endpoints

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Even the most experienced programmers can be caught unawares by software they've used for years without trouble. Dino Esposito explains why and how the JSON method in an ASP.NET MVC controller class suddenly started to cause an exception on a production server, and how he fixed the problem.… Read more
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14 September 2015
14 September 2015

Monitor Server Tasks with ASP.NET SignalR and Bootstrap

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Despite the fact that browsers were designed specifically to get information from the server only by requesting or 'pulling' it, developers have always yearned to be able to push data to browsers from the server. Typically, it would be to display, within a web page within the browser, the progress of a long-running task. Now ASP.NET SignalR and Bootstrap make it possible, with care. Dino explains how.… Read more
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13 August 2015
13 August 2015

Selective Updates with ASP.NET SignalR

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SignalR is great for all those tasks that one would otherwise need to rely on AJAX. However, it is much more versatile than this: it allows, for example, a server process to update users' browser windows selectively rather than broadcast to all, and can treat groups of users in different ways. Dino explains how this magic works.… Read more
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14 July 2015
14 July 2015

Tracking Online Users with SignalR

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SignalR is all about pushing notifications and data between web server and browser, but you can tap into a by-product of the work it has to do to keep track of the users who are currently online. This will provide a list of the users currently connected to a web community. SignalR has endpoints to push server events of any kind to the client, and thereby provides solutions for a number of common programming tasks.… Read more
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10 June 2015
10 June 2015

Tracking Online Users

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Sometimes, the requirements for a web application include a list of users that are currently logged-in. It would seem, at first glance, to be pretty trivial, but because few of us explicitly log out of web applications, the reality can get complicated. Even the best solution is a trade-off. Dino explains the issues and alternatives.… Read more
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18 May 2015
18 May 2015

ASP.NET SignalR: Old-fashioned Polling, Just Done Better

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A website often needs to update a page as the underlying data changes. You can, of course, just poll the server every few seconds on the browser via JavaScript, but to receive live updates from a site it is better to push data to the browser, using server-based SignalR. This uses web sockets to do this rather than browser-based polling where web sockets are supported on the browser. Dino explains how.… Read more
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18 March 2015
18 March 2015

Premature Scalability and the Root of All Evil

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When you're designing an application, there is a temptation to build it to a super-scalable future-proof architecture, even when the immediate requirements can be met by a simple single-tier application that can exploit the pure power of IIS and SQL Server. Dino recounts the painful story of what happened when the gurus got their way.… Read more
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28 February 2015
28 February 2015

RWD, Mobile-first, JavaScript and Performance

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The easiest way to make a responsive web application perform well is to minimize requests and the amount of data that is downloaded. The most dramatic way of doing this, for mobile applications particularly, is to download just the data you need to use. There are additional ways of doing this, such as 'Mobile first', Prioritized content, Intelligent markup and Compression, but the most important task is to minimize the data-download requirements.… Read more
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04 February 2015
04 February 2015

Quick and Dirty Web Data-Binding

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Sometimes, the sheer byzantine complexity of the typical JavaScript frameworks underlying a typical web application can give you pause for thought. If all you need is a simple way of creating a mobile-first application that involves creating simple markup templates, loading them into a DOM fragment and dynamically populating them with JSON data, then maybe a lean micro-framework like Mustache.JS would provide a better, leaner approach.… Read more
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15 January 2015
15 January 2015

Revisiting Partial View Rendering in ASP.NET MVC

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For any browser-based application, it makes sense to load into the web page just the content that is immediately required and avoid whole-page refreshes whenever possible. Ajax technology and JSON makes this partial-rendering easy. It is, however, worth considering ASP.NET's own partial-rendering techniques, returning HTML. It requires less client-logic and is quicker to implement.… Read more
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21 November 2014
21 November 2014

The JavaScript Overload and Micro Frameworks

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You can achieve a lot with HTML5 and CSS, but only if you employ JavaScript libraries as well. It used to be possible to restrict down to one or two libraries, but nowadays, the pressure is on to do more with a web page with such features as touch gestures, dynamic DOM updates or CSS switches. Is there such a thing as too much Javascript? Are we near the limits of what we can do with this technology?… Read more
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07 October 2014
07 October 2014

Responsive Web Design: Relying on the Form-Factor

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For visitors to get a good experience from your website irrespective of the device they use, you need to do more than just accommodate to the dimensions of the browser in pixels. To take it to the next level, you need to know about the device and its capabilities and characteristics. If we are facing ever-more diverse devices that can access the web, is it time to understand how to serve web-pages based on the 'form-factor'?… Read more
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22 September 2014
22 September 2014

Responsive Web Design: The Downsides

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Although Responsive Web Design (RWD) makes it possible to deliver design that is appropriate to a wide range in the dimensions of the browser-window, The designer cannot use RWD alone to adapt the UI to the actual device. It's not just the subtleties of the display device, but the way that the same volume of data must be sent to all devices; hardly suitable for an old smartphone with poor bandwidth.… Read more
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26 August 2014
26 August 2014

Responsive Web Design: the Costs

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Responsive Web Design is devised to help you render your website or web-based application appropriately on different sizes and aspect ratios of browser windows. Adopting it as a solution comes at a cost: It can't help to render a particular design on a specific device such as a model of smartphone. It also can require considerable refactoring of an existing site design, its navigation and testing. It has to be done right.… Read more
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11 July 2014
11 July 2014

Caching: the Good, the Bad and the Hype

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One of the more important aspects of the scalability of an ASP.NET site is caching. To do this effectively, one must understand the relative permanence and importance of the data that is presented to the user, and work out which of the four major aspects of caching should be used. There is always a compromise, but in most cases it is an easy compromise to make considering its effects in a heavily-loaded production system… Read more
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19 May 2014
19 May 2014

Shouldn’t Your ASP.NET MVC Apps Support Localization?

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An increasing number of applications are being designed to be configurable by the user to display content in a one of a number of alternative languages, currencies, date formats and other cultural aspects. It is better and easier to make such localization support intrinsic to the design rather than to retro-fit it. So what is the best way of doing so in ASP.NET MVC?… Read more
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