Next part in a series of Team Foundation Server 2010 Labs. Previous is available here (Lab 4, Test Runs).

This time it’s about Web Load Testing. When you are developing ASP.NET web application, it’s paramount to make sure your application is able to handle the required amount of requests, or at least you need to know the exact cap of your application for scalability planning. If your IT infrastructure is working according to ITIL / ITSM, you need to know what you need to scale out your application and how to do it right.

We are going to find the bottleneck in our application and refactor it when needed, so sudden success of our website will not mean eminent failure (see Slashdot Effect).

This Lab is longest so far (1h 17m) and contains materials which are valuable even if you don’t have TFS installed. You may perform Web Load tests using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and virtual machine with IIS installed, but that’s a good topic for another article.

And now – enjoy and don’t forget to watch it in full screen HD!

This screen cast of interactive virtual lab describes the feature of Test Cases and Shared Steps in Team Foundation Server 2010’s Test Manager.

Since there is still no MOC for TFS 2010 (although it has a number of 50430) the only resources you have for now are lectures of TFS gurus and virtual labs. Fortunately, usually that’s enough to pay attention to recorded lab session in order to understand the subject.

So, as always, enjoy the view and don’t forget to switch to Full Screen HD in order to see anything.

When I learn new material, sometimes it’s enough to me to see system in action to understand the principles behind it’s logic. Especially when it is self-descriptive lab like this one. Team Foundation Server 2010 is very complex but extremely valuable engine to energize your software development division, and one of it’s key features is automated testing.

With TFS automated testing you can automatically deploy virtual machines with required configuration, deploy the latest build of your software and test it for various scenarios. When bug is found, TFS (automatically) creates bug record in it’s centralized system, attaches screencast (video) of the incident and developer can work on solving that bug immediately.

Once you start working with TFS in your .NET software development, you can’t imagine life without it.

This lab is about creating and working with Test Plans, and while  there is no astrophysical concepts in it, the topic is usually hard to understand at first. The reason for that is quite simple – when you need to create schema for actual work, it’s harder to learn then performing the “real” action, as the necessity to do so doesn’t look as obvious, as, say, compiling your application.

Well, enough talking, enjoy the view! (And don’t forget to switch to HD!)

To see part 3 of this lab, regarding Test Cases and Shared Steps, click here.
Previous Lab (Test Manager Overview) is available there.

Just to repeat what I’ve said in my Twitter recently – now you have the ability to run Windows 8 Developer Preview on your VMWare Workstation. One week ago VMWare released Workstation 8.0, which doesn’t crash and indeed works quite well with Windows 8. Microsoft Virtual PC, as well as earlier versions of VMWare, still crashes.

After installation, you may notice that Start menu is changed by what is called Metro. If you prefer the “old” style Windows 7 menu, you can switch to that by switching one setting in Registry Editor.

In case you are using mouse, rightclick the taskbar, choose Task Manager, go to File and choose New Task. Now type regedit and click OK.

In Registry Editor, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer
There will be setting named RPEnabled. Doubleclick it and change it’s value from 1 to 0.

Now enjoy your start menu.

A little demo about how to use Test Manager from Visual Studio 2010 Test Professional / Team Foundation Server.

This one is the first of a series and doesn't either have or require any sound. Ideal for those who are using it as a reference during the work with real environment.

This is a typical lab from Microsoft Official Curriculum. Don’t know how you, but I usually enjoy seeing things done as much as doing them, whether it is a lab or a computer game.

As a web developer, I do care about browsers performance a bit less than typical web surfers do. I care more about the supported functionality. Whether my website can be viewed on this browser or another and how it will behave.

However, typical web surfers care more about speed and resources of their computers, so when I hear that people prefer Chrome to Firefox, this means my website should look well in that browser as well.

So here is a relative chart of today’s most popular web browsers after testing on my notebook. All numbers are totally relative, but tests included both graphics and data manipulations, the same for each test.

I don’t want to comment on it, as I find these results quite reasonable, but would like to look at the difference between MSIE 9.0 and MSIE 10.0. As you may notice, the Internet Explorer 10’s performance is promising.

So what did I understand from this graph? First of all, I will continue measuring performance of my applications using MSIE 9. And will make sure they are compatible with Chrome 13. And if that’s worth the effort, I will display demos using either MSIE 10 or Chrome. You can keep tracking the performance of browsers on your own equipment using PeaceKeeper website.