EnableViewState on ASP.NET Text box

While I was helping one of my friend this weekend in getting up to speed in ASP.NET basics, I was trying to demo View state by example and added couple of text boxes and a button control to showcase the stateless behavior of web and how view state helps(brings performance problems most of the times) developers to retain the values between post back.

But the sample app retains value between post back even after disabling the view state in control level and as well as in Page level. Puzzled a bit and tried to reproduce the same scenario with other controls such as check box and a calendar control. To make it worse for Calendar control the view state works as expected and for check box control, it maintains the state even though the view state is disabled.

After couple of minutes searched in Microsoft Knowledge base found this knowledge base article KB316813 which solves the puzzle stating that the following set of controls will persist value across requests even though the view state is disabled.

• The TextBox control.
• The CheckBox control.
• The RadioButton control.

The values which are posted to the server are handled by the IPostBackDataHandler interface.

Benchmarking the browser speed again

I did the browser speed test for all my browsers using SunSpider JavaScript way back in 2008 . When I installed IE 9 beta and after hearing all the "Beautiful web" marketing fundas from Microsoft, I was tempted to run the SunSpider script on IE 9 beta and other available counter parts.

Browser name	SunSpider(ms)	V8(ms)
Firefox 4.0b7	1416	583
Safari 5.0.2	1565	474
IE  9.0.7904	2143	337
Opera 10.63	1660	534
Chrome 8.0 beta	1984	1305
Firefox 3.6.10	3571	64.1

All tests were executed on Intel Dual core P8600 2.40 Ghz processor with 4 GB RAM in place.Results of Sun spider JavaScript in graph format below. Shorter is good.

There are also other alternatives available for benchmarking the abilities of a browser Google V8 benchmark suite and Mozilla Kraken. As Mozilla Kraken is based on Sun Spider and too young let us not consider for this benchmark.

Results of browsers on Google V8 benchmark suite v6 is (longer is good)

As Google considers its V8 benchmark suite v6 for its tuning purpose, it outperforms others pretty good.

Firefox 4.0 beta powered by Jager Monkey performs better than its predecessor Trace monkey(Firefox 3.6), Apple Safari's Nitro engine, Opera's Carakan & IE 9's the new Chakra engine.

Even though there is no significant change in Chrome's V8 engine, it still gives tough to other contenders. The most notable point is the Microsoft's transition  from Internet Explorer 8 to 9. MSFT changed the JavaScript engine, compatible with HTML 5, slick tear of tabs(like chrome), new tab page and new download manager(like Mozilla).

way to go Microsoft, but miles to go...

SharePoint on Cloud from Microsoft Online Services

SharePoint Online is a cloud-based service for businesses. In SharePoint setting up a web farm and get it up running form small enterprise was always a challenge in terms of hardware cost, getting the expertise to set up the web farm, capacity planning etc.

Now Microsoft wants to bring SharePoint to the masses by exposing it in the cloud thus it takes care of the infrastructure, scalability of the web farm, maintenance & patching the systems with less or no downtime and calculation of volume licensing(ever did or try to find the licensing math) with as low as 10$.

Reach out to SharePoint Online for small business which provides information related to the small enterprises. Developers can reach out to Developer resource center for understanding developer features available. I believe there should not be major change Developer resource centers with the API for development.

Finally SharePoint also joins the Cloud band. hmm.. result of significant innovation and development in virtualization arena.