Although .NET compiles into binary .dlls, these assemblies are extremely easy to reverse-engineer using Reflector, or any other decent Reflection tool. Although it’s not completely secure, the simplest way to protect your code is to run it through the free obfuscation tool that comes with Visual Studio: Dotfuscator Community Edition.... [Read More]

Knowing how to use PerfMon can be absolutely critical when faced with unknown performance problems on large information systems. When you’re faced with a performance bottleneck in a large server farm, it can be very difficult to track down issues as minor hiccups can have knock-on effects that are far... [Read More]

I hadn’t noticed it before, but ASP.NET provides a really simple way to encrypt your cookies. Cryptography is a field best left to the experts, but for simple encryption purposes this method is perfectly adequate. [Read More]

The caching of query plans in SQL Server is extremely important when it comes to application performance. The way this works is not very well understood - I still don’t get all the intricacies of it but as a general rule of thumb, it’s a good move to either: [Read More]

When you need to add complex configuration structures to .NET config files, you will generally create your own custom configuration section classes, and implement them within your application. However, if you just need a standard key/value pair, you don’t need a custom configuration type at all. Instead, you can just... [Read More]