Mike Snell

Mike Snell

Mike has over 12 years of experience writing and designing software. His broad range of experience covers creating enterprise-level, Web-based systems as well as commercial applications using the Microsoft platform.

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Articles Authored

  • ASP.NET Caching Strategies

    Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2002 - May/June

    ASP.NET provides developers with the ability to cache dynamically generated pages.This means that it is now possible to cache pages built on posted data and querystrings! For instance, an e-commerce site that generates the same catalog from the database over and over on nearly every user request can now simply cache the catalog pages. Caching saves precious database server CPU cycles and renders pages down to the client much faster. Of course, when the catalog data is updated, the cache can simply refresh itself. Furthermore, developers can define the length of time an item is to be cached, indicate cache dependencies, create cached versions per browser, and indicate where an item should be cached (client, server, proxy, etc.).

  • GDI+ Drawing Page, Part 1

    Last updated: Wednesday, April 14, 2021

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2003 - May/June

    There was a time, not too long ago, when browser-based user interfaces were considered both the status quo and the Next Great Thing.The demand for Windows Forms-based applications started to dwindle as the developer community fully embraced browser/server applications with their centralized server components and ubiquitous user interfaces. .NET, however, brings a much more powerful library of distributed communication technologies (such as Web services and remoting). As a result, .NET developers are seeing some of these traditionally browser-based applications becoming, more simply, Web-enabled and less tied to a browser. In short, developers can now see a very real business case for building distributed applications on Windows Forms technology.

  • Reflection Part 1: Discovery and Execution

    Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2002 - November/December

    One feature of the .NET environment is the ability to read meta-data from classes and namespaces created in .NET. This article demonstrates accessing this data.

  • Reflection Part 2: Emit

    Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2003 - January/February

    In our previous article, Reflection Part 1: Discovery and Execution, we introduced the System.Reflection namespace and its classes which allow developers to view assembly metadata, query for and discover types, and invoke code?all at run-time. In this article we will examine reflection emit?the ability to dynamically generate code at run-time.

  • The Enterprise Instrumentation Framework

    Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2003 - November/December

    We've all faced those irritable questions about our applications running in production. Typically a system administrator will spring one on you on a Friday afternoon just when you're finishing out the week with a game of foosball. Why did this request fail? What is causing so many disk IO spikes? What requests are failing as a result of this error? Why is the application running so slowly? Why are all the resources being gobbled up on the Web server? These questions often make us stare blankly for a while, mumble something, and then scramble back to our cave (or server room) for hours on end trying to provide answers,

  • Top 10 .NET Framework Classes

    Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2002 - March/April

    Microsoft .NET brings many important advances to the software engineering world.We believe that Windows developers everywhere have reason to celebrate the arrival of .NET, but Visual Basic developers should be the most ecstatic. We get true inheritance, structured exception handling, and a state-of-the-art IDE?but, perhaps the coolest thing .NET provides us as VB developers is the Framework Class Library (FCL). To commemorate the release of .NET, we thought we would present what we consider to be the top ten most useful, utterly awesome (and coolest) classes bundled inside the .NET FCL.