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How to get accurate Processor % numbers from VMWare during a Load Test.

By Ben Day On April 20, 2012 · 5 Comments · In Load Tests, Virtualization

If you read this blog from time to time, you know that I do a fair amount with Visual Studio Load Testing.  Well, when I’m working with a customer who hosts their apps inside of VMWare, it’s always been a just pain to know what’s *really* going on with processor utilization inside the virtual machine (aka. “inside the guest OS”.)

The issue is that VMWare’s hypervisor does a lot of magic that causes the Windows PerfMon counters for the Processor to be wildly inaccurate inside of the virtual machines. 

Every once in a while, I’d search around on the internet(s) for a solution but never came up with anything and I’d pretty much written off knowing the truth about [...]

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Call to Console.WriteLine() crashes Visual Studio 2010 Load Test Agent

By Ben Day On April 14, 2012 · 2 Comments · In Load Tests, Unit Testing / Test-Driven Development (TDD), Visual Studio 2010

This doesn’t make a shred of sense to me but I’ve been working on running some MSTest unit tests as part of a Visual Studio 2010 Load Test on a VS2010 Load Test Rig and ran into a very weird problem. 

Most of the unit tests behave perfectly when run as part of a load test but one kept causing problems.  When I’d run the load test I’d get an exception message saying “Error occurred running test.  Could not run load test ‘{load test name}’ on agent ‘{agent name}’: The given key was not present in dictionary.

I’d get this exception message box a few times at the start of the load test and then the load [...]

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Slides & Samples from my Visual Studio Live Vegas 2012 talks.

On April 4, 2012 By Ben Day

I spoke at Visual Studio Live 2012 last week and, as promised, here are the slides and code samples from my talks. 

Talk #1:
Top 7 Lessons Learned On My First Big Silverlight Project

Silverlight is tricky.  You’d think it’d be just like writing any other .NET app but there are some things that can really hang you up. 

In this session, Ben will show you 7 things that he learned leading his first big Silverlight 4 application.  From unit tests and the architectural havoc caused by async WCF to real-world ViewModel tips and “x:Name” code smells — these lessons will help you avoid a lot of pain on your current and next Silverlight projects. 

(Slides: [...]

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Scrum vs. The Time Zone

On March 25, 2012 By Ben Day

I had a call from a prospective customer about a month ago — let’s call him “Bob” — asking for advice about rolling out Scrum at his organization.  It didn’t go well.  I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that it didn’t go well because Bob started by asking pointedly, “are you one of those strict, dogmatic Scrum guys?”  The answer was and still is “no.”  (It turns out that Bob had contacted several other Scrum coaches in the Northeast US, discussed his problem, and since he heard the same answer each time, assumed “dogma.”)

Bob is a fairly senior manager at a large financial services institution.  Like most large institutions like this, their software development organization is geographically distributed [...]

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Prediction: Windows Phone 8 with Windows 8 Kernel soon.

On March 19, 2012 By Ben Day

As I was getting ready this morning, I started thinking about the technical hurdles that the Windows Phone SDK team must have around Windows 8.  I wonder if we’re going to see a phone (or at least a virtual machine) running on the Windows 8 kernel sooner than we think. 

This whole idea has the shape of an episode of Connections with James Burke. Anyone else watch that show growing up?  Well, if you didn’t, James Burke starts out the episode with one little piece of an idea in science and going from random connection to random connection, he ends up someplace else.  I’m going to start with my the Windows Phone 7 SDK and end up [...]

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“Scrum Under a Waterfall” at ALM Chicago

On February 22, 2012 By Ben Day

I’m presenting my “Scrum Under a Waterfall” talk today (2/22/2012) at ALM Chicago. 

Here’s the abstract:

It would be so easy if everyone at our companies just used Scrum — or at least Agile.  No one would lean on the team for dates and deadlines, and everyone would know that change is a good thing.  It’d be one great big happy project management family.  But let’s face it — an all-Agile organization isn’t always possible.  Maybe you have a Project Management Office (PMO).  Maybe you work for a government contractor.  Maybe you have regulatory requirements.  Maybe you’re the first Scrum/Agile project at your company.  Maybe your company simply *likes* it this way.  Whatever the reason, Agile teams [...]

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Scrum: “It’s easy enough if you can figure out what to build.”

On February 15, 2012 By Ben Day

The quote, “it’s easy enough if you can figure out what to build” comes out of an on-going discussion about project management that I’ve been having with my wife.  Her background is in biomedical engineering and she’s always been a little envious that (as she sees it) software is such a certainty. 

In biology and medicine, you might have an idea for something you’d like to build but you have practically *zero* guarantee that that thing can even be done.  It might work in a petri dish but not scale up.  It might work in mice but not in humans.  More likely you just can’t get it to work at all.  Considering her PhD research project, she [...]

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TFS Lab Management VMs: “The trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed.”

On January 31, 2012 By Ben Day

Have you seen this error before on you Team Foundation Server Lab Management virtual machines?  “The trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed.”  You’ll probably see it on VMs that 1) are joined to a domain, 2) you don’t use very often, and 3) use Hyper-V snapshots (aka SCVMM “checkpoints”). 

In reality, this error has nothing to do with TFS Lab Management or Hyper-V and everything to do with Active Directory and how computer account are managed and updated for domain members. 

Huge thanks to Jérôme Laban’s blog post describing the fix. (Jérôme, you rock!)

What’s going wrong?

Here’s my understanding of how to cause the error:

1. You create your [...]

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Debugging Visual Studio Load Test Rig Problems

On January 16, 2012 By Ben Day

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

On December 17, 2011 By Ben Day

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 get accurate Processor % numbers from VMWare during a Load Test.
    • Call to Console.WriteLine() crashes Visual Studio 2010 Load Test Agent
    • Slides & Samples from my Visual Studio Live Vegas 2012 talks.
    • Scrum vs. The Time Zone
    • Prediction: Windows Phone 8 with Windows 8 Kernel soon.
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