Ed Glas's blog on VS load testing

Liam Clearly recently used VSTS to test SharePoint and ran into a bug in the web test recorder. See his post here . The bug is that the recorder drops requests if the content-type is not set in the response. In this case, the page redirects to another...

When most people talk about automated functional testing, they are talking about UI Automated functional testing, where the test drives the UI (clicks buttons, types in text, etc.). In fact there are many other strategies for functional testing, and...

I've updated my collection of links for info on web tests and load tests. I had been publishing this to a sticky post on the forum , but ran into the size limit so I'm moving it to my blog. The page is here . Do let me know if you hit any links...

Web Test Authoring and Debugging Techniques for VS 2008 In Visual Studio 2008, many new features were implemented that eliminate the top issues found in the VS 2005 Web Test recorder, as covered in the white paper Web Test Authoring and Debugging Techniques...

We get asked a lot about what the various counter mean in a load test, like requests/sec, response time, tests/sec, etc. The counters are documented here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms404656(VS.80).aspx . Whenever I look for this page...

Check out this cool new web test plugin written by Neil Kidd on the UK development team. It enables you to write expressions for form post and query string parameter values. Without this tool, you have to go to code, either by writing a request plugin...

We’ve seen an odd problem on some machines where the initial user on Vista 64 doesn’t work. The work around is to delete your user settings, then the problem goes away. Go to control panel Open system Click advanced Click User Profiles...

We launched the Tester Center today, a new web site for the test community. Here you'll find links to guidance, tester blogs, articles, videos on testing, a forum, in short a whole host of valuable content for testing. Ed.

Check out Durga's blog post on setting up an agent in workgroup mode . One thing I noticed is that the install guide is incorrect, as it says that the "Simple File Sharing" is turned off when installing on XP in workgroup mode. You have to clear that...

A lot goes on in deployment. Michael Koltachev, developer of the feature, recently sent an email explaining it to one of our testers: · In Orcas we introduced a way to run tests with deployment disabled. In this case, we execute the tests from where...

Here is a nice set of short, focused videos hosted on ASP.NET: New Testing Videos on ASP.NET #1 | Introduction to Unit Testing with Team System (10 minutes, 54 seconds) #2 | Introduction to Testing Web Applications with Team System (9 minutes...

We recently uncovered a bug with Sharepoint file upload recording that may affect other file upload's as well. The problem is that the IE events we receive in the recorder do not include any post data after the file upload parameter. To workaround...

I've posted screen shots for most of the new Orcas features to my newly created photo gallery . Ed.

We have released a new version of fiddler and dramatically improved the web test generation from a fiddler recording. Get it at www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2 . What is fiddler? Fiddler is an http proxy debugging tool that allows you to record over an http...

Lot's of new stuff for web, load, and unit tests in Orcas . Follow the links for more info. Web test · Recorder now records AJAX and popups · Test-level validation rules · Auto-validate response URL · Composition/decomposition , also here...

I've been thinking a lot about web test correlation over the last 6 months. Web tests work at the http layer and do not run through IE. The web test playback viewer is a bit misleading, because we'll preview the page that was returned in a hosted IE...

Rohit Chauhan and Chris Patterson are doing web casts today and tomorrow on web tests and load tests , check them out! I'll update the info page with the links to the recordings once they are available. Ed.

One comment I've heard is where's the info on web and load tests? There's a lot of stuff on the web, it's just scattered hither and yon. So I've been collecting links and putting them on this forum post: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx...

The patterns and practices team, led by J.D. Meier and including Larry Brader and Carlos Farre, has teamed with a bunch of expert load testers as well as industry expert Scott Barber , to create best practices guidance for load testing. The guidance is...

Nearly every server team at Microsoft now use Visual Studio Load Tests to test their server. I've worked with a lot of the teams, and found a common pattern that I'd recommend using. First, load test early and often. With the cost of load testing tools...

The Dynamics AX perf team, headed by Sri Srinivasan and Ron Thompson, are on the cusp of releasing a beta of the performance workbench. The workbench enables users to run load tests against AX. This is a key offering from the AX team. In the past they...

The MOSS perf team (I think it stands for Microsoft Office Server System) just released sample web tests and load tests for testing Windows SharePoint Services, Office SharePoint Server, and Excel Server. The samples are on CodePlex. Even if you are not...

If you are running ASP.NET or IIS in 32 bit mode on a 64 bit machine, remote performance counter collection does not work by default. Read this post to learn how to do it. Reading 32-bit counters on a 64-bit machine Ed.

Here is the install guide for the agent and controller. It contains a bunch of useful sizing and configuration information, describing for example the different kinds of machine configs we support with VS, Controller, and Agent. This will be available...

Visual Studio includes a new load agent product for achieving scaleable load generation. The Team Test Load Agent enables you to configure an arbitrary number of agents that will work together to generate load against a web server or web farm. Key...