Ed Glas's blog on VS load testing

From this post, I see many users are having trouble with file uploads. Really this is not as easy as it should be. To upload a file, first record the file upload. I have a simple site that I did that on to generate this web test. The key parameter...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

We often are asked about our support for different load patterns in a load test. What's a load pattern? A load pattern controls the number of users that the load test is simulating at a given period of time in the load test. We ship with three load...

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...

I recently read Steve Seow's book, Designing and Engineering Time: The Psychology of Time Perception in Software . Steve is an expert on performance engineering at Microsoft, and really understands the human element and psychology behind software performance...

Many CIOs and Test Managers are interested in increasing the level of automation in testing efforts. What is automation good for? What is the best way to go about this? How much automation is enough? And who should do it, and when? I've heard on more...

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...

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...

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...

Users commonly experience problems collecting counters during a load test. These problems come in two flavors: 1) they are not able to collect any counters at all from a machine or machines, and 2) they see gaps in the counter collection. This article...

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...

A while back I posted this on automation . I want to resurface this topic now, as it has been on my mind a lot lately as we develop dev10. What is the “right” approach for automation? How do we make it pay off? Automation is hugely important for us...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Where are your bottlenecks most likely to occur? If you are developing an ASP.NET application on SQL Server, the first set of bottlenecks usually occur in the SQL layer, followed by the mid-tier ASP.NET code. The problem almost never lies in the static...

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...

A common question we are asked is how we deal with "new" vs. "return" users in a load test. Web browsers cache content and store cookies, which impacts the pattern and content of requests that are sent to the web server. Load test scenarios have a...