Ashutosh Nilkanth's .NET Blog

The Republic Day (Mon, 26th Jan) is near while the odd rains in and around New Delhi will hopefully not confine people indoors during this long weekend. To me, the most amazing sight in the city this time of the year is the evening view of the Rashtrapati Bhavan (Presidents House) which is all lit up and looks magnificent (see photo).

To organize my blog better I'm starting this new category of posts called Signal-to-Noise. Such posts will basically be aggregated random links, ideas, thoughts and resources from the .NET community and the technology sector. Here's today's scoop ...

Jake Ashcraft shares notes taken by Greg at the ASP.NET Road Show event. A good read if you've missed the Road Show.

Need help migrating your application from PHP/ASP/JSP to ASP.NET? Checkout the ASP.NET Code Migration Assistants

Rory Blyth is interviewed this week at .NET Rocks! Rory talks about the .NET community and the Open Source Software (OSS) community, writing, blogging, driving to the PDC from Las Vegas, Longhorn, and lots of other great stuff.

Stuart Langridge, writes about why he doesn't like databases and why to “use the filesystem as your database” (in context to the backend of a blog, I guess). IMO, it may hold some value to design a filesystem-driven data tier for ease-of-deployment or ease-of-maintenance (not that RDBMS administration these days is a highly complex affair for a sound DBA) or in the situation of “limited resource architecture” (where a physical database server may not be a feasible data source). But for ANY enterprise-level system or data-centric application, a database system undoubtedly provides high performance, efficiency, maximum storage capacity, extensive set of tools & components for interaction and management, a programming interface (i.e. SQL) and rapid integration capabilities (i.e. XML/SOAP) with legacy systems or other data sources. Persisting binary data (data blobs) in a database server is another story. Its a known fact that in a scenario where data query and server round-trips are high or constantly increasing, a filesystem-based data tier will bog down the entire application much quicker than a dedicated database-server. Talking of a larger picture, I doubt even Microsoft is moving away from this fact, with increased efforts to create a robust filesystem powered by a database engine (i.e. Longhorn WinFS). Filesystem vs database is an on-going discussion with two sides to a story. Considering SQLite, MySQL and PostgreSQL as inexpensive database server alternatives, I doubt cost has much to do with it.

Beta 2 of Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability from the Patterns and Practices book. As Sam Gentile blogged about beta 1 of this book, it contains a wealth of information for all .NET developers, but most particularly Architects. A must read!

The Middleware Company, a training/consulting company, conducted an experiment comparing J2EE and .NET performance. This whitepaper details those results. Free download - J2EE verses .NET performance comparison.