Brian Ritchie

 Razor-based view templates are a much cleaner way to construct MVC views in ASP.NET.  However, they were only released fairly recently with MVC3.

 In my recent posts on scalability, I've mentioned the Web Farm Framework (WFF) as a solution for managing a farm of IIS servers.  It adds a nice management Server Farm management UI into the IIS Manager.

In my last post, I introduced sparklines and showed you how to generate them using the Google Chart API.  Using an external API may not be appropriate for all applications, so here is a way to generate the sparkline using the .NET Chart API.

Sparklines present trends and variations associated with some measurement in a very compact form.  The term & concept was proposed by Ed Tufte.  This form of information graphic has become very popular for dashboards.  In this post, I'll show how add sparklines to your site using a custom HTML Helper method to generate code accessing the Google Chart API. In my next post, I'll show you how to add sparklines using the .NET charting API.

Today at the Jax Code Camp I gave a presentation on scaling out your .NET applications by leveraging IIS7, AppFabric, Web Farm Framework, and Web Deploy.  Thanks to everyone how come out to the session.

Gupreet over on the IIS.NET site posted a sample for integrating an F5 load balancer with the Web Farm Framework.  It works well, but isn't configurable.  I started adding my own configuration, but artisticcheese posted a project to CodePlex that already has this functionality.

Internet Explorer 9 is finally here...well almost.  Microsoft is releasing their new browser on March 14, 2011.

Microsoft has been beta testing SP1 since December of last year.  Today, it was released to MSDN subscribers and will be available for public download on March 10, 2011.