Real World .NET 4, C#, and Silverlight®: Indispensible Experiences from 15 MVPs

3

Ethical Hacking of ASP.NET

by György Balássy

Web applications have at least three important characteristics that are absolutely independent of the technology they are built on: They must be user-friendly, fast, and secure. As a web developer, you are probably sensitive to these aspects, and keep them on high priority, because you know that they heavily determine the success of your website.

When you design the user interface and the architecture of your application, you can constantly focus on these three facets. You can try to find the best arrangement of the user interface (UI) elements, and try to fit the components to get the best performance results. However, even with your best efforts, you have an important component in your system that can help you to reach (or keep you from reaching) your goals: the web platform.

If you have an inherently slow base technology, you cannot boost it and make it fast, not even with your hardest work. Your application can be profoundly optimized for performance, but if the underlying platform is inherently slow, you are doomed — the speed of the underlying platform is the key to your success. You can have a cheetah, but if it travels on the back of a turtle, it takes a long time to reach its destination.

The same is also (or even more) true for security. Web applications today do not handle web protocols at the low level because the programming frameworks provide a high level of abstraction that increases developer productivity. This abstraction ...