To setup the sample, follow the below steps:

1) Have VS 2005 or Visual Web Developer and SQL Express installed.  Visual Web Developer and SQL Express are both free downloads and provide everything you need to build, debug and run the application.  You can download them from here.

2) Download this .zip file containing the sample.  Expand it into any directory you want.

3) Using Visual Web Developer or VS 2005, choose File->Open Web-site and point to the root directory of the sample sub-directory (the one with the files in it).

4) Select the “Products.aspx” file and hit run.

This will bring up a page like the screenshot above that lists products and allows you to page back and forth throughout a product category listing (note that the next/previous buttons will auto-hide if you are at the beginning or end of the listing).  Click on the left-hand side of the page to switch category listings.

To add a new product category, run the “AddData.aspx” page:

Figure 2

When you add a new product category, you can specify the number of products to add to it.  You can add dozens, hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of products (the AddData.aspx page names the products sequentially for you automatically so you can simulate different sized loads).

Because the data paging implementation in the sample uses an intelligent paging algorithm that only pulls the needed page rows to the web-server (by default only 10 rows per web request), your server won’t start to run into performance issues even if you have a category or result with tens of thousands of product results.