In the beginning of January, we released the Web Developer Checklist with great interest from the general web community. The checklist helps raising awareness of common best practices for building websites.

It was always the plan to branch the checklist out into technology specific checklists to make it even easier to apply all the best practices.

Today we’re excited to announce the first technology specific checklist – the ASP.NET Developer Checklist. It contains links to many ASP.NET specific tools and solutions to common problems.

Not only is it a great tool for all ASP.NET developers to learn from, but also to track the progress of implementing the various best practices.

We hope it will be received well and add value to the millions of ASP.NET developers worldwide. In the meantime we will be working on finishing another ASP.NET specific checklist that focuses on website performance.

ASP.NET is just the first of many web technologies to receive its own checklist, so remember to check the Web Developer Checklist often for updates.

Rule #1 in website optimization is to enable GZip compression on the web server. This is very easy using web.config as explained here. However, some web servers have disabled automatic compression of JavaScript files, because they are served with the content type: application/x-javascript.

For these web servers we can use a web.config trick to change the content type of JavaScript files to text/javascript. This is a completely valid content type supported by all browsers.

Just paste the following XML snippet in to your web.config’s <system.webServer> section.

<staticContent>
  <remove fileExtension=".js"/>
  <mimeMap fileExtension=".js" mimeType="text/javascript" />
</staticContent>

Chances are that you don’t have this issue, since it seems to only apply to some hosters, but now you know how to get around it should you ever end up in the situation with uncompressed JavaScript files.