Summary

This chapter discussed ways of limiting the number of requests that the browser makes to the server and the size of the requests and their responses. This is to make the visitor feel that the website is more responsive, and reduce the load on the server.

We first looked at introducing client-side validation, which does validation of user input on the browser, rather than only on the server. Here, we looked at ASP.NET validation controls which are easy to implement, but have relatively high overhead. We also saw the Validate plugin for jQuery, which has very low overhead, but is more difficult to use.

This was followed by five ways to send data from the browser to the server without a full-page refresh. These ranged from very easy to implement but high in overhead (UpdatePanel controls) to harder to implement but very efficient (custom-built HTTP handlers). Two solutions in between those extremes were page methods and web services. We also looked at WCF Data Services and the Entity...