Version 2 of the Quick Reference Guide has now been published. This guide is chock-full of information gathered through real experience with the product. This new version contains 97 new or updated articles . Special thanks to Geoff Gray for once again spearheading this effort. Geoff is one of a handful...

I am very excited about the new level of documentation we have in this release. Howie Hilliker has done a fantastic job enhancing our documentation. We actually have screen shots and artwork in the docs now! Also thanks to the load test product team for reviewing the content. The documentation has been...

I am happy to say that VS 2010 is generally available starting today! Go to the Visual Studio home page for information. As you are probably aware, we put a huge investment in our testing products into this release. I outlined the new features with my post Elevating the Role of the Tester with Visual...

In VS load tests come with a few load patterns out of the box: Constant load: holds count of users steady Step load: steps the count of users up to some level then holds them steady Goal-based load: adjusts the user load up and down to reach some goal But what if you want to simulate several peak loads...

Michael Koltachev, Geoff Staneff, and the rest of the TE team put together a valuable troubleshooting guide for troubleshooting a VS 2010 test rig. Check it out at http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vststest/thread/df043823-ffcf-46a4-9e47-1c4b8854ca13 . In VS 2005 and 2008 agent and controller...

Contents Overview How Web Performance Tests Work Overview of New Features in VS 2010 Debugging a Web Test to Find and Fix Dynamic Parameters Adding Your Own Web Test Recorder Plugin to Make Record/Playback “Just Work” More Recorder Enhancements in VS 2010 New Tools Options for the Recorder Looping and...

dynaTrace offers a terrific integration with VS 2008 to enable performance analysis of java and mixed .NET + java applications. The integration is now even deeper with VS 2010. With VS 2010, you can drill straight from a specific slow Web page in a load test to the dynaTrace truePath for that page...

The Dynamics AX product team is a long-time internal customer of VS Load Tests, and use VS to do all their product load testing. They released the Benchmark Toolkit to customers, which enables Dynamics load testing. This is a huge win for Dynamics AX customers, as it provides a way for them to find performance...

If you are currently using VS 2008, here is how I compare the products and components you use for load testing. VS 2008 VS 2010 Description Key differences VS Team System Test Edition VS Team System Suite...

Visual Studio 2010 RC is available on the Web today for MSDN subscribers. Go to the RC landing page for details. We have a very short window, just a few weeks, for incorporating feedback from you back into the product for RTM. Please install the RC today, so we can fix any critical issues you find in...

In this post I outlined the products you need for load testing with Visual Studio 2010. I included a diagram with one configuration option for load tests. Here I will discuss other configurations available. Configuration 1: “Local” Load Generation This is what you get when you install Visual Studio Ultimate...

Here are the VS 2010 SKUs, and testing features available in each (see this link for more feature comparisons). Client SKUs Name Test tools it contains Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Test Tools in VS Premium Load Testing Network Emulation IntelliTrace Microsoft Test Manager (manual testing and test case...

In beta2 we added a number of new minor features, and a couple of major ones. We also changed our licensing model, which you can read about here . Here is a list of the minor features we added, along with a brief description of each. The last one in the list, compare two runs in Excel, is probably my...

As you are probably already aware, Visual Studio Beta 2 is now available for download, see the landing page here . For load testing, you will need to download and install: Visual Studio Ultimate Beta 2 (x86) Visual Studio 2010 Team Agents Beta 2 (x86) Ultimate is the new equivalent of Team Suite, and...

In Visual Studio 2010, we are changing our load test licensing model. In VS 2005 and VS 2008, we shipped the load agent, which was licensed by CPU on the machine generating load. In Visual Studio 2010 we are changing our license model to a virtual user based model . This new license model offers a number...

In dev10 we’ve added a new Virtual User Activity Chart that shows virtual user activity. Each row on the chart is a virtual user. Covering the Basics of the Chart See Sean Lumley’s post VSTS 2010 Feature- Load test virtual user activity visualization to see an over view of the Virtual User Activity Chart...

If you install the dev10 beta 1 on the same machine as VS 2008, and you are running load tests, read this. When you run the first load test, the load test will check the schema of the load test database, and if it is the 2008 schema it will update the schema in place. This will create problems for you...

A fantastic example of a partner taking advantage of the new extensibility points in Web test playback and load tests in dev10 is provided by dynaTrace. dynaTrace has developed an extension that provides enables you to drill from a particular request to the PurePath for that request. The PurePath provides...

I am very excited and proud to introduce the new testing features you’ll find in Visual Studio 2010. In addition to continuing to work on the performance testing tools, I have also been focusing on delivering a new set of products for the entire test team. Since most testing is done manually, we have...

Beta 1 was released to the web today for MSDN subscribers. If you are a MSDN subscriber, you can download the Beta today from here . We have been very busy on this release of late (one reason why my blog posts have slowed down lately :)) My team and I will be blogging about all the great new features...