Welcome to the world of Visual Studio Team System web and load testing

I'd like to start this blog by introducing myself.  I'm a Software Design Engineer (SDE) working on the next generation web and load testing tools in Visual Studio 2005 Team System.  Specifically, my work focuses on coded web tests, the browser recorder, and the web test object model.

The web and load testing tools we're building will replace Application Center Test in Visual Studio. Our tools make web and load testing a first class experience integrated with the rest of VS and Team System. You can create web tests and unit tests and run them together under load across multiple machines. Like ACT, we have the concept of tests consisting of a static list of URLs and tests that are scripted, but we have significantly minimized the capability and performance differences between these two types of tests. In fact, it is possible to write a coded web test that performs equally as well as a static XML-based web test.

I have a few ideas for interesting blog posts, but please leave me a comment if you have any particular questions, topics, or problems you'd like me to cover. Also, let me know what you think if you've been using the Community Tech Preview (CTP) release.

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2004
  How will the new load testing suite work with SSL protected sites and sites behind a web cluster? How will user authentiation be handled as well?
• Anonymous
  August 11, 2004
  Matt,
  Our recorder records browser events rather than the underlying HTTP traffic. In effect, our recording happens before anything gets SSL encrypted, so SSL sites don't present a problem for us. The other benefit of using a browser recorder is that we don't record all the gif, css, and js files that each page contains. All of those "dependent requests" are dynamically determined at runtime, so you won't have to re-record your web tests if the look of your site changes.
  
  For sites behind a load balancer, we have the option to run a web test under load using a range of client IP addresses. That is, each web test iteration will select its IP address from a pool so the load balancer will spread the load across multiple servers in the cluster.
  
  As far as authentication goes, we support all the standard HTTP authentication mechanisms including NTLM (depending on whether you consider NTLM to be standard HTTP).
• Anonymous
  August 11, 2004
  Show us that object model! What's a coded test look like that, say, does a google search on "VSTS" and fetches the first 4 pages of results?
  
  Also, as much as you have permission to do so, screen shots (as PNG's if possible) would rock - show off what that code can do! The stair-stepping, the perf counters, etc. etc. - the demo's are out there, but demos can be a bit heavyweight sometimes :)
• Anonymous
  August 24, 2004
  What about Proxy authentication? It doe not seem to work during playback in the May technology preview. For that matter, I cannot get NTLM or SSL to work during playback either.
• Anonymous
  August 24, 2004
  Brian,
  If I remember correctly, there were bugs in the pre-Beta 1 .NET framework that prevented SSL and NTLM from working properly. I'll make a note to check on proxy authentication.
• Anonymous
  September 08, 2004
  Thanks, John. I downloaded and tried the Beta 1 refresh. I am still unable to validate a recorded script that uses proxy authentication, SSL or NTLM. Is this still broken?
  
  Thanks
• Anonymous
  May 06, 2009
  [翻译]欢迎来到Visual Studio Team System web and load testing世界