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...

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...

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...

Sean has a great post on running Web tests and load tests from the command line . A hidden feature is that you can set parameter values from environment variables, which enables you to target different environments with the same test without editing the test. You may develop your web tests and load tests...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

Eric Lawrence has added a cool new feature to fiddler to visualize what is happening in your http traffic. Here's a snippet from the online fiddler help : Timeline The Timeline Tab shows the transfer timeline of selected HTTP Sessions. NOTE: You should enable Streaming Mode for the highest accuracy...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...