UZUN.NET

If you work in the states, and do a project for the government, then your projects should be accessible according section 508 guideline.  So if you are doing a web site, what does that mean?

• If you have an image on the page, the image tag should have an alt attribute describing what the image is about ( .net puts the alt attribute in the code but it is blank )
• if you have complex table,you should define scope and table header (gridview supports this)
• if you put a video, you should have subtitles
• if you have a form and labels regarding to textboxes, you should use label for to associate labels to textboxes, in asp.net you have a label, use associtedcontrolid property
• dont imitate the header using css
• make sure ur site is visible when you disable the css
  

these are the common problems i see in the web sites but not all :)

good luck making ur site accessible

Ok, i told abot our problem yesterday. For some reason, the .net framework was throwing an error to event logs, saying that connection pool is full, and it couldnt connect to the database so the site was down. We rebooted the servers, restarted iis etc, this solved the problem for only a few hours. Of course our first intention is to go to the code and try to find the connection leaks, and fix them, but in the mean time what are we going to do ? when the site isnt working, your first goal should be making the site work, not coming up with the best solution.

My first dirty, fast solution is turning off the connection pool. To do this, open your web.config file, go to connectionStrings node, and inside the connection string properties add: "Pooling=false;". This will turn off all the pooling, I did this, and site came back alive, i was suspecting a slow web site, as now there is a hit on the database everytime the page loads, a connection is created everytime. Our daily hits is like between 25-35000. The default page is hitting the database 4 times to query 4 different tables, and guess what we dont have caching. The simple calculation shows that we hit the sql server 120,000 times/day just to display the home  page. If there is a leak in the connections, it is pretty costly. So anyways, we turned off the pooling, and next thing is, i asked the server admins to monitor the sql server resources as we might be using lots of cpu and ram for not using pooling. They told me after a day that, sql server was ok, no performans problems :) sweet!!, so i turned off connection pooling, and site is working without putting a load on the sql server. Then why do we have pooling enabled ? :) probably it ll be even faster once we fixed the leaks. 

We found out that one of our programmers do not open the connections inside a try catch block, also not disposing the sqldatareader. So we are fixing those (see yesterday's blog about the solution), and also we started to implement a caching mechanism so that the first time page is loaded, we will read the data from the database, put it in the cache. I ll measure the performance, before and after and will let you know what happens :)