September's Toolbox Column Now Online
My Toolbox column in the September 2009 issue of MSDN Magazine is available online and includes the following reviews/discussions:
- Improving Web Application Performance With Distributed Caching - provides an overview of distributed caching for web applications, with discussions on three products: memcached, an open source option that powers many high-profile sites like LiveJournal, Wikipedia, and SourceForge; Velocity, which is Microsoft's foray into the distributed caching market; and third-party commercial implementations, like ScaleOut Software's ScaleOut StateServer and Alachisoft's NCache, which was reviewed in the October 2007 issue.
- Blogs of Note: Udi Dahan - Udi is a speaker, trainer, and consultant on software architecture and design of distributed systems. He has worked on several large-scale, service-oriented applications for enterprises, and blogs about his experiences building enterprise applications on his blog. Check out the 'First time here?' page on Udi's blog, which has links to his most popular and engaging articles and blog posts.
- AutoMapper - it's not uncommon to need to transfer objects of one 'shape' into a different shape. This is particularly common when exposing data through a service layer. Internally, you work with your entities in terms of business objects that model your domain, but when exposing this data you may need to return a more appropriate object type that contains fewer properties. These objects used in the service layer are referred to as Data Transfer Objects (DTOs). Writing the domain object to DTO mapping code is tedious. AutoMapper, a free, open source project - helps relieve that tedium by making such object-object mappings as easy as writing two lines of code.
This issue did not include a book review.
Enjoy! - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee413550.aspx
As always, if you have any suggestions for products, blogs, or books to review for the Toolbox column, please send them to toolsmm@microsoft.com.