Practical .NET

Get Rid of the Old ASPX View Engine

Peter didn't bother doing any performance testing but he believes that this change has just got to speed up your ASP.NET MVC application.

File this tip under the "I bet everyone knew this but me" heading: A couple of months ago, I was somewhat surprised to discover that my ASP.NET MVC applications were loading two view engines: The RazorEngine that I actually use and the original WebFormViewEngine from ASP.NET MVC 1.0 (because I came to ASP.NET MVC on or about version 3, I never used that engine). Furthermore, ASP.NET was occasionally referring to that engine, throwing away some cycles.

I decided to remove that engine and keep just the Razor engine. So far, I've had no problems. If you want to do that also, here's the code you should add to the Application_Start method in your Global.asax file:

ViewEngines.Engines.Clear()
ViewEngines.Engines.Add(New RazorViewEngine)

I'm not suggesting that you'll see some enormous speed gain, but I have to believe it's going to save me some cycles.

About the Author

Peter Vogel is a system architect and principal in PH&V Information Services. PH&V provides full-stack consulting from UX design through object modeling to database design. Peter tweets about his VSM columns with the hashtag #vogelarticles. His blog posts on user experience design can be found at http://blog.learningtree.com/tag/ui/.

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