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Debugging Visual Studio Load Test Rig Problems

By Ben Day On January 16, 2012 · Leave a Comment · In Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), Load Tests

I was setting up a Visual Studio Load Test rig for a customer recently and we ran into a handful of problems related to Performance Monitor Counters.  Here are a couple of the problems and their solutions.

Problem #1: You run the load tests on the Load Test rig and you get an error that says “The performance counter category ‘Memory’ cannot be accessed on computer ‘{server name}’ (Access is denied); check that the category and computer names are correct.”

What’s Going Wrong?: There’s an “access is denied” error related to one or more performance counter(s) on one of servers under test.  Since performance counters are collected from the Visual Studio Load Test Controller machine in the load test [...]

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How to Create Custom Performance Monitor (PerfMon) Counters

By Ben Day On December 17, 2011 · 1 Comment · In Uncategorized

I’ve been helping a customer develop some Visual Studio 2010 Web Performance Tests and Load Tests for their application.  Basically, they have an estimate in mind for how many simultaneous users they need to support and want to verify that they can actually handle this load. 

Their application is a Silverlight front-end that talks to a number of WCF Services.  The focus for the load tests have been been primarily the WCF services and the server-side code.  For the first few days, we tried to look at how many service calls and see how many simultaneous operations they were handling and how quickly each operation completed.  You can basically figure this out by watching response times on the [ServiceOperation] [...]

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“How to be a C# ninja in 10 easy steps”: Slides & Code

On December 3, 2011 By Ben Day

I spoke at Microsoft DevBoston a few days ago and did my “How to be a C# ninja in 10 easy steps” talk.  As promised, here are my slides and my code samples. 

Abstract:
Are you new to C# and want to get awesome? Are you pretty good at C# and you want to raise your game? Do you think you’re already awesome and just want to make sure? Worried about getting into a C# technical interview and Ben’s on the other side of the table lobbing tough C# questions at you just waiting for that moment where you start to sweat and then eventually crack under the pressure and then you die homeless [...]

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TFS2010’s Stories Overview Report: What are “Test Points”?

On November 26, 2011 By Ben Day

I was visiting a new customer yesterday who is thinking of adopting Team Foundation Server 2010.  Amongst other things, they asked me for an overview of the SQL Server Reporting Services Reports –- specifically, which reports are good for Project Managers.  My first thought was the Stories Overview report.

The Stories Overview report (see Figure 1) gives a high-level view of what User Stories (aka ‘work’ or ‘requirements’) are scheduled for the current Iteration, how much work has been completed on each User Story, how many hours of work is remaining for each User Story, plus information about QA testing activities such as test results and bugs. 


Figure 1 – The Stories Overview Report

As [...]

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My slides and sample code from DevTeach Ottawa 2011

On November 4, 2011 By Ben Day

I just wrapped up my sessions at DevTeach Ottawa 2011.  I gave the following two talks and, as promised, here are my slides and sample code.

Too Slow: Use VS2010 Profiling & Load Testing to Manage Performance Issues

You thought you knew how to write fast code but your app just doesn’t perform. Massive servers and still only 20 concurrent users? What is going wrong? You can find out by using Visual Studio 2010’s code profiling features.

Want to know how many users your app can currently support? Want to know how many users it takes to crush your servers? Or perhaps you want to know why the app breaks under load? Was it memory? Disk usage? Networking? IIS? SQL [...]

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VSLive Redmond 2011 Slides and Sample Code for my Unit Testing & TFS2010 Build Sessions

On October 24, 2011 By Ben Day

I spoke at VSLive in Redmond, Washington last week and gave two talks: 1) “Team Foundation Server 2010 Builds: Understand, Configure, and Customize” and 2) “Design For Testability: Mocks, Stubs, Refactoring, and User Interfaces.”

Here are the abstracts:

Design for Testability: Mocks, Stubs, Refactoring, and User Interfaces

You’re sold on unit testing. You’re even doing “test first” development – but there are always those nagging questions. How do your user interfaces fit into your testing plan? Do I have to call my database in order to have a good, solid test? What about calls into separate sub-systems or calls out to web services? Do you really need to have all those pieces running in order to test your [...]

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Three possible causes for TFS to Project Server sync “failure”

On October 22, 2011 By Ben Day

If you didn’t know already, there is a connector from Microsoft that lets you synchronize work items in TFS with enterprise project plans in Microsoft Project Server.  I’ve been working with this synchronization feature for a project that I’m doing and ran into a couple of “user error” problems.  Put another way, everything was configured but I couldn’t get any work items to sync.  Even when I ran the command to export the work item sync errors (“tfsadmin ProjectServer /GetSyncMessages”) I was getting nothing. 

Turns out that the problems were all related to “user error”.  (Doh!)

First off, huge thanks to Federico Kolliker Frers and Siddharth Bhatia at Microsoft for them help with [...]

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Disable REST WebRequest URL caching on WP7 Mango

On October 6, 2011 By Ben Day

I’m writing an application for Windows Phone 7 Mango that should be hitting the marketplace shortly.  The application allows you to access the real-time feeds that report MBTA bus locations and predictions for when buses will arrive at a particular stop.  These feeds are exposed as REST services. 

Yesterday, I found that I wasn’t able to refresh bus stop predictions and, after I drilled into the problem, I discovered that Mango was caching the result of the request.  Same request URL always returned the same response data.  Well, this wasn’t helpful because the data changes from minute to minute.

Problem: Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) returns the same HTTP response result for a given request URL sent to a [...]

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Speaking at DevTeach Ottawa: November 2 through November 4, 2011

On September 30, 2011 By Ben Day

Some more news.  I’ll be speaking at DevTeach in Ottawa, ON.  The schedule isn’t 100% set in stone yet but the conference runs from 11/2/2011 through 11/4/2011 and I’ll be giving two talks.

Here are the abstracts:

Too Slow: Use VS2010 Profiling & Load Testing to Manage Performance Issues

You thought you knew how to write fast code but your app just doesn’t perform. Massive servers and still only 20 concurrent users? What is going wrong? You can find out by using Visual Studio 2010’s code profiling features.

Want to know how many users your app can currently support? Want to know how many users it takes to crush your servers? Or perhaps you want to know why [...]

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Speaking at VSLive Redmond on October 20, 2011

On September 30, 2011 By Ben Day

Updated 10/24/2011: the slides and code samples for these talks are available here.

FYI, I’ll be speaking at VSLive in Redmond, Washington on October 20th, 2011.  While I’m there, I’ll be giving two talks: 1) “Team Foundation Server 2010 Builds: Understand, Configure, and Customize” and 2) “Design For Testability: Mocks, Stubs, Refactoring, and User Interfaces.”

Here are the abstracts:

Design for Testability: Mocks, Stubs, Refactoring, and User Interfaces

You’re sold on unit testing. You’re even doing “test first” development – but there are always those nagging questions. How do your user interfaces fit into your testing plan? Do I have to call my database in order to have a good, solid test? What about calls into [...]

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  • Recent Blog Posts

    • Debugging Visual Studio Load Test Rig Problems
    • How to Create Custom Performance Monitor (PerfMon) Counters
    • “How to be a C# ninja in 10 easy steps”: Slides & Code
    • TFS2010’s Stories Overview Report: What are “Test Points”?
    • My slides and sample code from DevTeach Ottawa 2011
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