Sams Teach Yourself .Net in 21 Days

By Jason Beres

• Table of Contents
  • Copyright
  • About the Author
  • About the Technical Editor
  • Acknowledgments
  • We Want to Hear from You
  • Introduction
  • Week 1: At a Glance
  • Day 1. Introduction to the Microsoft .NET Framework
  • Day 2. Introduction to Visual Studio .NET
  • Day 3. Writing Windows Forms Applications
  • Day 4. Deploying Windows Forms Applications
  • Day 5. Writing ASP.NET Applications
  • Day 6. Deploying ASP.NET Applications
  • Day 7. Exceptions, Debugging, and Tracing
  • Week 1. In Review
  • Week 2: At a Glance
  • Day 8. Core Language Concepts in Visual Basic .NET and C#
  • Day 9. Using Namespaces in .NET
  • Day 10. Accessing Data with ADO.NET
  • Day 11. Understanding Visual Database Tools
  • Day 12. Accessing XML in .NET
  • Day 13. XML Web Services in .NET
  • Day 14. Components and .NET
  • Week 2. In Review
  • Week 3: At a Glance
  • Day 15. Writing International Applications
  • Day 16. Using Macros in Visual Studio .NET
  • Day 17. Automating Visual Studio .NET
  • Day 18. Using Crystal Reports
  • Day 19. Understanding Microsoft Application Center Test
    • Introduction to Application Center Test
    • Understanding ACT Projects, Users, Tests, and Connections
    • Using the ACT Standalone Application
    • Walking Through the ACT Script
    • Understanding the ACT Test Results
    • Summary
    • Q&A
    • Quiz
    • Exercises
  • Day 20. Using Visual SourceSafe
  • Day 21. Object Role Modeling with Visio
  • Week 3. In Review

Introduction to Application Center Test

Application Center Test (ACT) is an enterprise tool integrated into the Visual Studio .NET development environment that allows stress and regression testing of Web projects.

ACT enables you to create VBScript or JScript routines to drive testing. Using ACT, you can create complex tests that can run repeatedly to provide baselines for performance and to ensure that software issues haven't crept into the project.

The ACT product distributed with .NET is a subset of the functionality found in Application Center, which is a Microsoft enterprise tool allowing creation and management of clustered Web servers. The Application Center Test in the Application Center suite also allows tests to be run from multiple client computers because the load generated from a single computer is limited by processor, memory, disk, or network connection at some point.

Some features of the main ACT included in Visual Studio .NET are

• Integrates with the Visual Studio .NET integrated development environment (IDE)
• Creates and manages cookies
• Records a test script while browsing with Microsoft Internet Explorer
• Supports testing of secure sockets layer (SSL) Web pages
• Allows several authentication schemes
• Accumulates test data for later analysis
• Allows configurable simultaneous connections to drive the testing from a single computer
• Does not allow multiple client computers to be coordinated
• Is not appropriate for heavy load testing of scaleable sites

The last two items are part of the full Application Center product.

Strategy for Using ACT

The easiest way to use ACT is from the Visual Studio .NET IDE. You can add an ACT project to your solution and run it directly from Visual Studio .NET. This allows testing and editing of the script, but you don't have the same robust functionality of using ACT outside the Visual Studio .NET environment.

A second way to use ACT is in standalone mode. From the Visual Studio .NET menu, ACT is available under Visual Studio Enterprise Features. Using the standalone program enables you to set many more parameters than using the IDE integrated ACT, such as connections and iterations from the user interface. Using the standalone version also enables you to create specific users that are used to run the test, in addition to the ability to add performance counters.

For creating the test script, a recording tool is included that works like a macro recorder you learned about this week when creating macros in Visual Studio .NET. When you start recording, the recording tool opens a Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) session, enabling you to manually browse through the target Web site, clicking on the features or links you want to test. As you're clicking around in IE, each click is recorded and the data being downloaded to the browser is recorded. This is the basis for the test.

If you use the standalone ACT or the integrated ACT, a script file is created that you'll probably want to modify and tune. When you take a careful look at the script, you'll see that it's pretty simple. All features of ACT and the interaction with the browser can be scripted.

As you'll see later, all the ACT settings except the scripts are stored in XML files. If you're motivated enough and can remember last week when you learned how to work with XML, you can modify the XML files to adjust to interfaces in any way you choose.

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