The Eighty-Twenty Solution

I was at the bookstore today, and noticed that the character of the shelves devoted to .NET is starting to change, with titles like Real World ASP.NET, Real World ASP.NET Best Practices, Real World .NET Applications, Performance Tuning and Optimizing ASP.NET Applications, Maximizing .NET Performance, and Designing Scalable .NET Applications. It seems like this is a common stage in the devolopment of the platform, where there's a large number of people out there who have built applications and are now trying to figure out how to make them work in the "Real World". Most of these titles are APress titles, so maybe that's just their editorial direction and not a statement on the community as a whole, but I think these titles represent a welcome direction. I've only browsed these books, but the general advice seems to be all along the same lines: Clustering is a problem, Session State is a problem, ViewState can be a problem, synchronous processing can kill you.