One of the reasons ASP.NET is successful is that it lowers the bar for Web developers. You don’t need a Ph.D. in computer science to write ASP.NET code. Many of the ASP.NET people I encounter in my work are self-taught developers who wrote Microsoft® Excel® spreadsheets before they wrote C# or Visual Basic®.Now they’re writing Web applications and, in general, they’re doing a commendable job.
But with power comes responsibility, and even veteran ASP.NET developers aren’t immune to mistakes. Years of consulting on ASP.NET projects has shown me that certain mistakes have an uncanny predisposition to keep pitfalls occurring. Some of these mistakes affect performance. Others inhibit scalability. Still others cost development teams precious time tracking down bugs and unexpected behavior.
Here are 10 of the pitfalls that litter the path to releasing your production ASP.NET applications, and what you can do to avoid them. All of the examples draw from my experiences with real companies building real Web applications, and in some cases I provide background by describing some of the problems that the ASP.NET development team encountered along the way.
