Back in November, I started asking for your top tips on ASP.NET and SQL Server performance.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, we’ve now published 50 of our favourite in a free, brand-spanking new eBook – 50 Ways to Avoid, Find and Fix ASP.NET Performance Issues.

When we asked for your tips, we really weren’t sure what sort of response we were going to get. The whole idea was a bit of an experiment. We knew there were stacks of great guidance out there – every time I go to a .NET event I learn a clever new trick – but we really weren’t expecting the avalanche of advice that came through from all of you. It was seriously hard work to pick the pieces that should go in.

However, the time has FINALLY come to announce the lucky winner of the prize – a Microsoft Surface – for the best ASP.NET performance tip. And it is…(drumroll)…Troy Hunt, for this pearl of wisdom:

‘Always profile your ORM database hits with SQL Profiler during development. ORMs get away from you very quickly. Before you know it, you’ve run a query 2000 times in a loop, when you could have retrieved all your data with a single database hit’

The judges also thought these tips (these are just the headlines) were worthy of a more-than-honourable mention:

Remove unused View Engines
Kevin Griffin
@1kevgriff, www.kevgriffin.com

Avoid running sites in debug mode
Dave Ward
@Encosia

Make sure paging is conducted at the database layer
Anthony van der Hoorn
Developer of Glimpse
@anthony_vdh

Don’t underestimate the value of the UI when tackling performance problems
Jeremy Jarrell
@jeremyjarrell

But those are just the icing on the cake. There are 45 others in the book, covering ASP.NET and SQL Server performance, so there should be something new for just about everyone! You can download the full set from www.red-gate.com/avoidfindfix.

I’d really like to thank our panel of judges and the LIDNUG group for all the hard work they did to make this a success, but most of all I want to thank all of you out there in the ASP.NET community for taking part.

Of course, why stop at 50? If, when your leafing through the eBook, you think there’s something we’ve missed, let me know. We’re still looking for more! You can reply to this blog post, or get in touch with me directly at michaela.murray@red-gate.com.