RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX - Now with more speed!

The Q3 2009 release comes packed with goodies and we hope you'll enjoy the new additions to your toolbox. And it's fast too.

For starters, a number of micro-optimizations on the client-side has resulted in less boilerplate code. But the big breakthrough comes on the server-side where you can expect improvements of up to 30%, depending on your scenario.

So, how did we manage to do it? By deleting code, of course. Well, not just any code, but a reflection-intensive piece that was seeing a lot of use.

Just don't spend too much time Reflecting.

(Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/welshbaloney/)

The code in question is crucial to control operations – the DescribeComponent method. It's responsible for serializing control properties and sending them to the client-side control counter-parts. Until now this was done with reflection, but we've figured out a way to get rid of it. It was replaced with a set of shiny new T4 templates that do the same job, but at compile time.

Don't just take my word for it - we have benchmarks. The test page is a typical* form:

* User Experience experts can show signs of violent disagreement upon reading this statement.Agree with everything they say and you’ll be fine.

I've used the excellent Eqatec Profiler (it's free by the way - http://www.eqatec.com/tools/profiler) for measuring performance:

That's almost 30% improvement! I know, I know – it's only 27,55344%, but it's still pretty good!

The Q3 2009 Beta will be available in your Client.NET accounts tomorrow. Feedback is welcome, as usual!

You can download the sample project here:

DescribeComponent.zip