Making an enterprise application more robust - ASP.NET/C#

Question

I am working with a team of 10 developers in enhancing an enterprise app built on .NET/C# and SQL Server 2005. The application is mature and large but there are lots of opportunities for improvement in terms of reusability, scalability and performance.

I would like to help in making the application more robust and would like to know where I could pick up suggestions/tips related to ASP.NET and SQL Server. As an example, I helped in adding Memcache to the application that made the application perform faster. I am not looking only for major enhancements - the smaller ones help too. One of the smaller changes we made was in creating a library that encrypts hidden data making the app more secure (Earlier, the hidden input form fields were not encrypted)

I haven't worked with larger apps before and my experience lacks in this area. Any online resources, websites, books, whitepapers, articles that would help me in my quest?

Answer 1

• Compress and optimize the ViewState.
• Minify javascript
• Sensitive data should never be on hidden fields (encrypted or not)

Also see this question, most of it applies to your question.

Answer 2

I'm not sure how much your team focuses on usability, but I've been doing a lot of reading about it lately. Specifically, this book:

GUI Bloopers 2.0

If you make sure you're not committing any of the bloopers in there you'll be doing your users a huge favor. The most interesting section for me involved the perception of speed. Even if you optimize a certain algorithm to be faster, the users might still have the perception that it's slow. That's what really impacts how people feel about your app.