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...

RTTS , a premier testing consultancy and test tools training company, now has training available for performance and load testing with VSTS 2008. RTTS specializes in providing software quality services, and offers training on a variety of tools. It is great to see VSTS in the mix as they see demand for...

There’s a hidden problem with VS 2008 load testing that you need be aware if you are running tests locally (as opposed to using a controller and agents). If you purchase and run a load agent, load agents run on all cores and all CPUs on the machine. However, when running locally VS limits load...

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...

The VSTS Ranger team, led by Geoff Gray, just published the VSTT Quick Reference Guide 1.0 . This is a comprehensive collection of technical information on VSTT –- 83 pages of information!!! Many questions you may have on how stuff works in web, load, and unit test are answered in this doc. This doc...

The annual testers choice awards are out in STP magazine , and VSTS took top spot in two categories in this years tester's choice poll, winning out over load runner for ".NET Performance Testing" and for "Integrated Test/Performance Suite". Congrats to the team who worked so hard on VS 2008 product...

I spent last week in LA at the PDC. The conference was mainly focused on the new technologies Microsoft is working on bringing to market, such as Windows 7 and Azure. We also introduced the features in our next VSTS release, which customers were super-excited to see. It's always great to step back at...

Web tests have a number of extensibility points before and after a request. What order do they run in? The hooks are: WebTestPlugin.PreRequest WebTestRequestPlugin.PreRequest ExtractionRule.Extract ValidationRule.Validate Here is a sequence diagram that shows what order things fire: There is no guaranteed...

Check out James's recent post with the eye-catching title “if Microsoft is so good at testing, why does your software suck?” I have another angle on this, which I saw first hand with our Whidbey release. It goes to some of the themes I refer to in my So you want to automate your test cases? post. We...

I've updated my links to info on web and load test post with the following links: New Item Templates for custom rule and plugin development Data Driven Web Testing With Visual Studio 2008 Team System InfoPath Forms Services 2007 Web Testing Toolkit SharePoint Server 2007 Scalability and Performance...

Inspired by templates developed by Dennis Bass of the services test labs, I added new item templates to the codeplex.com\TeamTestPlugins project. If you install these on your machine it makes creating new plugins much easier: If you work with web and load tests you'll find these very handy, and they...

dynaTrace just completed a nice integration with VSTS web, unit and load tests that enables them to do end-to-end tracing of performance. In addition to getting overall performance numbers, they have a feature called PurePath that let's you trace, down to a given web test request, what calls that request...

There are times when your web test may fail with a 404 error in a dependent request (like a css file or gif), but you may not actually care about this error. For example, it may be something that doesn't really impact the layout or content of the page. Or you might file a bug and temporarily want to...

Check out the stats for the WCF load test tool on codeplex. The tool is approaching 2000 downloads! Kudos again to Rob Jarratt, who wrote this tool. It's great that we have a platform with the right extensibility hooks that enables us to produce out band solutions to key problems like this one. I had...

I updated my Links to Info on Web and Load Tests post with new links. The last update was in March, so it was due. I also moved some links into a separate table that are specific to 2005. Some of the 2005 context still applies to 2008, so I left that in the main table. Most of the links are to new content...

In SP1 we added a new Random property on the Extract Text rule. This simple property enables some really powerful scenarios. The best example is to randomly select a link that is the result of a query. This works nicely if search result urls are uniform and pass the selection as a query string parameter...

Check out these videos on MSDN. Here's the landing page for VSTS videos. Here are the testing related videos: How Do I: Create a Data-Bound Web Test? How Do I: Use .NET Code to Customize Coded Web Tests? How Do I: Use the Visual Studio Team System Test Load Agent? How Do I: Manage Test Results and Test...

A reader asked about my post on SQL Load testing , and why someone would want to use that vs. Read80Trace and OStress . OSTRESS does straight record/playback of a trace file, but does not allow you to do experiments on mixing up commands, nor does it allow you to parameterize your tests. For example...

I've published a new project to http://codeplex.com/teamtestplugins . This project is based on VS 2008. A summer intern we have from Duke, Herodotos Herodotou, has developed a nice set of rules we did not have before. All of the rules have to do with the inner text of a tag. For example, for a select...

A pretty common need when you are testing your web application is to filter out certain types of dependent requests. For example, if a page you are testing has an ad in it from an external site, you may not want to hit that site in your load tests. Here is a simple WebTestPlugin that will allow you to...

Check out the new SQL Load Test project on CodePlex ! Rob Jarratt, the VSTS ranger who wrote the WCF script generator for load testing WCF apps has done it again, this time for SQL! Once again he teamed up with the Services Test Lab to deliver this tool, this time working mainly with Geoff Gray on several...

Bill Barnett has posted a couple of great articles detailing the new APIs we've added in SP1. Check these out to see the powerful extensibility points for controlling load patterns in a load test, and more/better hooks in web tests that enable some key scenarios such as easily filtering some types of...

In VS 2008, we added a new Validation Rule ValidateResponseUrl. In VS 2005, a very common problem was that a page would redirect to the error page, but the web test engine did not automatically recognize this as an error. Then downstream in the playback another page would fail, usually with "hidden...

The load test reporting project on http://CodePlex.com/LoadTestReports has been updated with terrific new capabilities. A new report builder enables you to build reports in MS Word or HTML format, and customize the output. You can select different counters to display, and add comments to each section...